A Response, or Some of the Things I Wish I Had Also Said

My book has been out in the world for precisely one year as I draft this response, and it's been an honor and a privilege to receive such thoughtful, and sometimes challenging, feedback on what I wrote. What occurs to me is that, of course, a book is never truly done, even when it exists as a tangible and seemingly fixed object. It's something that lives and evolves now through the readings of others, and I'm delighted to have this opportunity to think through with my colleagues some of what this book accomplishes, as well as where it may fall short. Let me begin by first acknowledging the incredible insight and intelligence that Christopher Phelps, Julio Capó Jr., Lisa Levenstein, Christina Hanhardt, and Joshua Hollands all bring to this endeavor, and to also thank Julie Greene for putting this forum together for Labor. What a dream team of interlocutors this is!In the interest of utilizing well the limited space that I have been allotted, I will only briefly overview the book's main arguments and otherwise refer readers to the book's introduction for a more comprehensive treatment. But I can preview a lot of what the book does with a single anecdote that appears in the book's first chapter. It concerns the story of a midcentury government economist whose security clearance investigation had revealed her homosexuality, and who was on the brink of being fired from the Treasury Department. Her immediate boss, who was sympathetic to her plight, helped set up an interview for her with some private sector economists from New York. She was fortunate that he was willing to help, and also that the New York firm was not looking for someone to do government work. But still she had a strategy to ensure the needed outcome: she asked her boss to be sure that the prospective employer knew about the clearance problem [i.e., her homosexuality]. This was shrewd on her part. For the New York company, “the clearance problem” was not an impediment, but rather an opportunity to get a highly skilled economist at a significantly reduced price. “They knew the only reason they could hire me was because of that clearance,” she recalled. For the economist, the job offer came much more quickly than she had expected, and was “an end to my desperation.” But it was also “a lesser job” [than she would otherwise have taken].1That single episode encapsulates key dynamics unfolding in many different kinds of workplaces at midcentury that I elaborate on in the book. This was a moment when the rights consciousness of many gay people was shaped by the Lavender Scare, and it was commonplace to know of others who had lost jobs. There were a range of ways in which queer people (in the private as well as the public sector) carried that vulnerability, but to my surprise, I found that many were not engaged in deep hiding; rather, they were simply practicing discretion. As such, they were often somewhat seeable and knowable to employers. And many employers, even seemingly tolerant and sympathetic ones, keenly took advantage of the vulnerability of this segment of the labor force. Some workers could be underpaid relative to skill level; others would stay in jobs they felt safe in, even when mistreated, or would tolerate work others wouldn't, or were easily pushed out with even minor downturns in the business cycle. Gay people, in addition, brought unique assets to the companies they worked for: as people who presented in the workplace as “unattached,” they were simultaneously available to work split shifts and holidays, to put in extra hours, to travel or even be relocated by the company on a moment's notice. In other words, they were flexible, contingent, and cheap workers in an era otherwise characterized by inflexible, expensive, and often cumbersome labor relations. For all of these reasons, as long as they didn't embarrass the company, gay people could be advantageous hires. The relationship between bosses and queer workers at midcentury was often defined therefore by a kind of bargain struck by both sides. This was a mutual agreement to try not to see, to try not to be seen.Yet what was the alternative for those who refused the terms of the bargain, or for those gender nonconformists who, due to their appearance, simply could not make it in mainstream jobs? Those workers belonged not to the straight work world of the bargain but to a queer work world that overlapped with the secondary labor market populated by women and workers of color (some of whom were also queer) in low-paid, low-status work where gay people could be open and where nonnormative gender expression was sometimes affirmed on the job. Gay people who lost jobs in the straight world sometimes ended up in the queer work world as well. “ ‘Resigned to waiting tables’ ” was the conclusion, for example, of one schoolteacher fired for homosexuality in the early 1960s.2 The visibility and stigma of the queer work world loomed as a threat that also reinforced the vulnerability of those who were working under the terms of midcentury's bargain.In addition to describing the queer and straight work worlds of midcentury, my book also details how the workplace gradually opened to queer people over the latter portion of the twentieth century, coming to resemble something that would likely be more familiar to us now. I'm grateful for Lisa Levenstein's brilliant framing here of the workplace as a place that motivated activism and also as a site that activists targeted for social change. Various efforts to not only survive on the job but also alter the workplace really drive the narrative for much of the book—whether it was Frank Kameny's long fight to reform government policy, or the pleas that liberationists (often unemployed) made for gays to reject the terms of the bargain, or the efforts of lesbian separatists to create an alternative economy that freed them from economic dependence on men, or the work that lesbian and gay law practices did to try to forestall job loss during the AIDS crisis, or the movement for employment rights that unfolded in the corporate sector at the tail end of the twentieth century. One fascinating development that Levenstein, as a historian of social movements, picks up on is the increasing prevalence of professional LGBT advocacy, especially in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. Beginning in the 1980s, then, the long-standing opposition in gay life between “ ‘being queer’ ” and “ ‘being something’ ” (in one's work life) began to erode.3Now in thinking about the change that did unfold across the second half of the twentieth century, one observation I make in the book is that gay workplace rights had a distinctive relationship to the law. In contrast to other groups that suffered from discrimination on the job, queer workers gained no underlying blanket protection (such as the protection that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided for women and racial minorities). State and local laws were few and far between, quietly enacted, under resourced in terms of enforcement mechanisms, and generally underutilized. So in the midst of the AIDS crisis, when so many lost jobs, and after years of getting almost nowhere in advocating for federal protection, some employees in the corporate sector thus went directly to their companies to ask for protection and recognition. The corporate sector was eventually receptive, such that the most meaningful and robust version of gay employment rights came not through legal mandates but through the market. This is, I think, a fascinating and surprising development, and one that reflects not corporate altruism but, rather, how well gay workers fit the template of late capitalism. The attributes that we now identify with post-Fordism (short-term, precarious work arrangements for atomized rather than attached workers) were the precise attributes that, going back to midcentury, could be identified with gay labor across all sectors of the economy. This helps to explain why business was out ahead of the government (and even of labor unions) in advancing gay rights during these years.There are some problems, of course, with making the corporate sector such a hinge in my story, and they circulate through many of the comments here. At first glance, it perhaps lends a strange valence to a book that is claiming to be a labor history. Yet because gayness is “transversal” to class (meaning gay people do not cluster in one or another socioeconomic position but are found distributed across the class structure), a queer labor history that is attempting to be somewhat comprehensive should include, as mine does, both working-class and professional jobs.4 More problematic is the way that ending the book with a chapter on the corporate sector seems in some way to give the “last word” to subjects who were predominantly white (but not as male as one might assume). I was struck by how these subjects, who are usually associated with affluence and privilege, were so often running scared in their jobs. In my attempt to make their vulnerability plain, I wish I had simultaneously leaned more into their privilege as well, perhaps, as Christina Hanhardt suggests, by probing urban gentrification and property alongside work.5 But I do want to underscore that while the actors in this final chapter are white and middle- to upper middle-class professionals, the chapter nonetheless tells an important story about race and class writ large. For what was achieved through this particular workplace movement (as least in the short term) was only patchwork protection (meaningfully extended usually in corporate but not in manufacturing or other kinds of jobs). And so it left much of the working class as vulnerable as ever. The result was that by the end of the twentieth century, middle-class and wealthy gay people were far more likely to be visible on the job than poor and working-class queers were. This was a striking reversal, I argue, from the mid-twentieth century, when queer people were far more likely to be visible in working-class occupations than those in most professional settings dared to be. This is a class story that is also heavily racialized. Indeed, one of the things I learned from conducting oral history interviews for my book was that while people in working-class jobs were far more likely to be open than those in middle-class jobs at midcentury, those who were most open in working-class jobs were queer workers of color. Again, this is a pattern that flips by the end of the twentienth century when selectively available workplace protections made it safer for (mostly) white middle- and upper-class professionals to be the most open. So there are some intriguing hints here not about how, to quote Allan Bérubé, “gay stays white” but actually how gay becomes white, meaning culturally associated with whiteness (and class privilege), as well as the potentially important role of workplaces in manifesting that change.6That queer workers of color were the most visible on the job at midcentury (and among the least visible later) is not the only important finding about race I discovered in my research—as profound was hearing from Black gay workers that they thought homosexuality was not only a point of vulnerability but also sometimes helped them in their working lives. This was because of the way their queerness sometimes put them into interracial networks where they could make educational, employment, and mentoring contacts with white people to which their straight Black contemporaries would not have had the same points of entry. But in general, I agree with Julio Capó Jr. (and Joshua Hollands and Christina Hanhardt) that my book would have been a better one if it had done more with race. I'm not sure pursuing a greater number of interviews (as Capó suggests) was really viable—I did make a considerable effort at that and just found some limits to my access there (among other things, see the point above about patchwork protection and the lasting vulnerability on the job of queer workers of color). I love Capó’s point, though, about “intentional and creative historical work,” something that guided my research on lesbians throughout this book and one of the reasons, for example, I ended up telling the story of work and lesbian collectivism (through Diana Press and Olivia Records). I wish I had thought to engage, as Capó smartly suggests, the Combahee River Collective's critique of capitalism as well.7Capó also has some qualms, as does Christina Hanhardt, regarding the analogy that I make in chapter 2 of the book between gay labor (at midcentury) and some forms of immigrant labor (then and now). I did not mean to imply, as I think Capó suggests, that these were commensurate or equivalent work experiences, and I think I am clear in my description that the scales of vulnerability were different.8 Yet as I explain in the book, there are two ways that thinking about immigrant labor helps to illuminate the situation of gay workers at midcentury: As I write, Both types of workers were often perceived as advantageous hires because they were sometimes viewed as unencumbered by dependents—with queer people because whatever the reality of their attachments they often presented as functionally single at work, and with certain immigrant groups because families were left behind in sending countries. Second, and as importantly, for both groups, the potentially illegal status of the workforce shaped working conditions. Gay people shared with certain immigrants, in other words, a presumptive status as “illegal” persons, and this licensed exploitation and otherwise shadowed their movement through the working world.9So without saying these are equivalent experiences, or negating that some immigrants are also queer, I do still want to insist that there is something about the way status coercion has shaped, and continues to shape, the working lives of some immigrants (especially the undocumented) that helps me to comprehend the status coercion that shaped the lives of queer workers in the past.10 That said, I agree with the historian Regina Kunzel's recent assertion that analogical thinking often produces a “vexed politics,” and it's quite possible that I will in time come to see this analogy as more troublesome for the differences it obscures than the labor regime it perhaps helps to elucidate.11 I will keep thinking about it.Christopher Phelps raises some questions about the very mechanisms at the heart of midcentury's bargain, as well as the way I periodize the years I associate with it. He is skeptical that workers were as knowable to their employers as I assert, especially in the period that overlapped with the Lavender Scare (which Phelps sees as finally thawing around 1963). I describe workers in this period as “appearing” at work in a range of ways—some clung to secrecy, others instead utilized discretion. Few people in the straight work world were “declaring” themselves, although the government economist with whom I began this essay certainly did that as part of her strategy for reemployment. More commonly, especially away from government, many people merely “covered” their queerness, keeping their “stigma from looming large,” in the words of the sociologist Erving Goffman.12 As a result, there were employers who surely “saw” their employees, and there is a fair amount of evidence in my book—drawn both from my interviews and from archival records—that some employers knew and took advantage of this before 1963. “I have one of those employers who shrugs off the idea that he has a homosexual employee,” one man wrote to a homophile organization in 1957, to take one example, “with ‘I hire for work.’ ”13 That same year, two women from the personnel field told members of the Mattachine Society that the undesirable discharge (itself associated with homosexuality) “was not the hazard” for employment it was imagined to be. Many gays were working in jobs, these two HR professionals noted, where “the discharge is known by their employers.” (Avoid the civil service, they cautioned.)14 And gay liberationists didn't just make “Come Out” their “slogan,” as Phelps argues here; they also attacked the bargain and the labor regime it supported directly. “ ‘Our bosses know we're gay,’ but pretend not to notice, one liberationist tract explained. For that, ‘we are profoundly grateful, as we are expected to be.’ ”15 “Coming out” thus may not always have meant, as Phelps suggests, emerging from deep hiding; it might also have meant simply ending the charade in which both gay workers and their employers together engaged in a form of collusion. Yet here I mean only to gently push back against an incisive critique. Phelps is undoubtedly correct that I do flatten the period before liberation. If I had it to do again, I would work harder to try to parse the 1950s and 1960s and understand what changed when.16 My temporal imprecision is perhaps matched by a spatial one, as others point out. In addition to interviews in San Francisco, New York, Washington, and Boston, I did do several (in-person) interviews in Florida and and in the of and as well as interviews with in all over the I could have been more about this and more than I with more as Joshua Hollands to and the way that shaped queer work several colleagues to the at the end of the book. The final chapter of the book undoubtedly that things do sometimes come from the market. I my in this reflects (which I not as Phelps I do think to the historical can make the between LGBT rights and more than the it sometimes I see the to business in the late and to as a lot to do with the of other on the the available to them in their historical as well as how vulnerable queer people were in their employment across many different sectors at that And I do in the book's insist on the of the that finally extended Title discrimination of to both gay and My book is a after of what it has meant for queer people to through the world without that and the particular ways employers did in take advantage of that after the most forms of had Rights all forms of and the between and a Yet I I end the book and of why rights do has been an to economic exploitation for some workers) rather than about And I love the way Christina Hanhardt her essay by some questions about on the left and her as well about what might of the was after my book was in but in all forms would certainly be on my are so many other here that I have space to Let me end by just that we are in a moment when both of these history of and labor and and also to one So I very much to and from all the work that will of it in the the ways that some of that work I and and on what I to do in I thank Christopher Phelps, Julio Capó Jr., Lisa Levenstein, Christina Hanhardt, and Joshua Hollands for such a and