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Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America
A masterful history of the LGBT workforce in America
Workplaces have traditionally been viewed as “straight spaces” in which queer people passed. As a result, historians have directed limited attention to the experiences of queer people on the job. Queer Career rectifies this, offering an expansive historical look at sexual minorities in the modern American workforce. Arguing that queer workers were more visible than hidden and, against the backdrop of state aggression, vulnerable to employer exploitation, Margot Canaday positions employment and fear of job loss as central to gay life in postwar America.
Rather than finding that many midcentury employers tried to root out gay employees, Canaday sees an early version of “don’t ask / don’t tell”: in all kinds of work, as long as queer workers were discreet, they were valued for the lower wages they could be paid, their contingency, their perceived lack of familial ties, and the ease with which they could be pulled in and pushed out of the labor market. Across the socioeconomic spectrum, they were harbingers of post-Fordist employment regimes we now associate with precarity. While progress was not linear, by century’s end some gay workers rejected their former discretion, and some employers eventually offered them protection unattained through law. Pushed by activists at the corporate grass roots, business emerged at the forefront of employment rights for sexual minorities. It did so, at least in part, in response to the way that queer workers aligned with, and even prefigured, the labor system of late capitalism.
Queer Career shows how LGBT history helps us understand the recent history of capitalism and labor and rewrites our understanding of the queer past.
Workplaces have traditionally been viewed as “straight spaces” in which queer people passed. As a result, historians have directed limited attention to the experiences of queer people on the job. Queer Career rectifies this, offering an expansive historical look at sexual minorities in the modern American workforce. Arguing that queer workers were more visible than hidden and, against the backdrop of state aggression, vulnerable to employer exploitation, Margot Canaday positions employment and fear of job loss as central to gay life in postwar America.
Rather than finding that many midcentury employers tried to root out gay employees, Canaday sees an early version of “don’t ask / don’t tell”: in all kinds of work, as long as queer workers were discreet, they were valued for the lower wages they could be paid, their contingency, their perceived lack of familial ties, and the ease with which they could be pulled in and pushed out of the labor market. Across the socioeconomic spectrum, they were harbingers of post-Fordist employment regimes we now associate with precarity. While progress was not linear, by century’s end some gay workers rejected their former discretion, and some employers eventually offered them protection unattained through law. Pushed by activists at the corporate grass roots, business emerged at the forefront of employment rights for sexual minorities. It did so, at least in part, in response to the way that queer workers aligned with, and even prefigured, the labor system of late capitalism.
Queer Career shows how LGBT history helps us understand the recent history of capitalism and labor and rewrites our understanding of the queer past.
312 pages, Hardcover
Published January 31, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
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March 13, 2023Very readable. Much felt recognizable - renewed my interest in trying to grasp what the long term consequences of these experiences are on us- emotionally and socially, and also on straight people.
September 24, 2024
Has capital fulfilled its promise of granting each person the “freedom in the double sense” of Marx? Freedom from other forms of labor, like subsistence farming – or domestic labor? – and the freedom to sell your labor power for a wage without restrictions? Given the many legal battles devoted precisely to that goal in the US – of being able to sell your labor power unfettered, without restrictions posed by things like gender, sexuality and race – the question merits asking.
Margot Canaday attempts to redress gaps in the dominant understandings of the history of sexuality by putting the work and workplaces of queer people at the center of her historical study. She records the various work worlds of mid-century queer people in the US, analyzing the causes and effects of changes in those work worlds over time. She devotes as much care and attention to larger, “impersonal” forces of history like the economic crises of the 70s and the interests of capital, the AIDS epidemic, the US government’s rollbacks of affirmative action, as she does to continued collective actions by queer liberationists, one extraordinarily intransigent astronomer and those he convinced to work with him, lesbian lawyers, queer nurses, and gay employees in big tech – all of whom organized in various ways to exert a greater degree of control over the circumstances of their lives, chief among them their workplaces. She takes care to not treat every queer individual worker as a singular rational economic agent, isolated from their social context, much as she does to not treat workers as an undifferentiated mass. Toward this end, she also devotes time and space for the lives and actions of low level clerks, front desk employees, taxi drivers, dancers, waiters, nurses, sex workers, garment factory workers, funeral home and bookstore owners, and various other workers who found meaning and reward in the work they did, finding the work affirmed their queer identities: sometimes through the plentitude and visibility of other queer workers in such occupations, sometimes through these jobs’ ability to provide enough subsistence to lead the kind of lives queer people wanted (like having enough to buy opera tickets and go to gay bars).
These workplaces provided, in other words, community survival spaces for queer people: they were "a trap and a refuge." Canaday looked at government and corporate archives, conducted over 150 oral history interviews, and combed through the personal papers of dozens of queer workers; she provides plenty evidence from the historical record for her central argument, the theorization of gay work as a “form of labor.”
So, what is Canaday's central conceit of “gay labor?” She attempts to think systemically about what conditioned work for queer people, how it was conditioned, to what end. In the postwar golden age, gay labor was defined by the precarity (that is, mobility, vulnerability, and disposability) of gay, lesbian and gender non-conforming workers in the primary labor sector. This precarity was created in large by the spectre of the lavender scare and the larger state project of criminalization of homosexuality and gender nonconformity, by the fear of queer people usually knowing at least one other queer worker who lost their job because of their homosexuality; these state policies were the subject of Canaday’s first book, the Straight State. In Queer Career, the second part of the diptych, Canaday lays out how "queer" careers could be in a "straight state" for queer people – how the vulnerability codified by the state was exploited by employers, as a “release valve” in the Fordist system that otherwise relied on unionized labor, a family wage, and loyalty of (mostly white, male) workers to a single company, in exchange for dropping radical labor tactics like strikes, all of which was expensive and only worked during the postwar boom, more or less. In the eyes of employers, gay workers didn't carry the additional expense and complication of a spouse, and so could be relocated to other places and worked for longer hours. Further, because gay workers usually knew at least one other queer person who lost their job in relation to homosexuality, and/or was relegated to secondary or tertiary employment sectors -- where most gay workers were actually concentrated -- they could be fired without putting up a fight, relocated, forced to work longer hours, and employed for lower wages in exchange for being employed in the primary sector at all. (Page 68)
This latter exchange was the midcentury "bargain:" capital got a more exploitable segment of the labor force, a necessary Fordist release valve (responding to the state's codification of the legal vulnerability of queer people), for which it offered queer people a "dont ask, dont tell" sort of toleration in primary sector workplaces in exchange. The bargain is Canaday's main argument against the "common sense" notion that gay workers were not economically exploited, and only faced discrimination in the cultural and social sphere. The bargain prefigured a couple important subsequent developments: the extension of precarity to the majority of workers from the mid 70-s onwards, and – I'm not sure Canaday says this directlly, but - it also prefigured "the business case," the makeshift d-alliance of the corporate world with its queer workers from the 90s onwards.
The business world had been somewhat receptive to queer workers seeking protection from discrimination and the labor movement had been too, both more so than the state. As labor unions started losing power, focusing most of their efforts on defending and preserving the gains they had not yet lost, they became less receptive to queer workers; while the state remained at best quietly and minimally receptive, and there had been precedent for an arrangement with business -- which was seized on by both queer workers and employers.
The “business case” was the cause of what is, to me, tied for the most striking reversal (inversion?) identified in the book: queer workers in corporate contexts changing from least visible in the white collar context from 1945-75 or so, and the most visible from 90s onward. What ties this reversal for most striking one is one Canaday identifies in a footnote: in working class lesbian couples, the primary breadwinner being the femme, sometimes through sex work, with the butch being less of a wage-earner, more responsible for the reproductive labors of the household (Page 98, footnote 161) – another plus for Canaday’s contention that in prioritizing the “aesthetic and romantic,” that is, “cultural” aspects of queer history as separate from the workplace, historians have left a gap in our understanding of the economic aspects of queer history.
My favorite part was inevitably Frank Kameny’s politics of annoyance: sending Kafka to government lawyers, flaunting the lack of a law degree as an advantage, and so on.
Margot Canaday attempts to redress gaps in the dominant understandings of the history of sexuality by putting the work and workplaces of queer people at the center of her historical study. She records the various work worlds of mid-century queer people in the US, analyzing the causes and effects of changes in those work worlds over time. She devotes as much care and attention to larger, “impersonal” forces of history like the economic crises of the 70s and the interests of capital, the AIDS epidemic, the US government’s rollbacks of affirmative action, as she does to continued collective actions by queer liberationists, one extraordinarily intransigent astronomer and those he convinced to work with him, lesbian lawyers, queer nurses, and gay employees in big tech – all of whom organized in various ways to exert a greater degree of control over the circumstances of their lives, chief among them their workplaces. She takes care to not treat every queer individual worker as a singular rational economic agent, isolated from their social context, much as she does to not treat workers as an undifferentiated mass. Toward this end, she also devotes time and space for the lives and actions of low level clerks, front desk employees, taxi drivers, dancers, waiters, nurses, sex workers, garment factory workers, funeral home and bookstore owners, and various other workers who found meaning and reward in the work they did, finding the work affirmed their queer identities: sometimes through the plentitude and visibility of other queer workers in such occupations, sometimes through these jobs’ ability to provide enough subsistence to lead the kind of lives queer people wanted (like having enough to buy opera tickets and go to gay bars).
These workplaces provided, in other words, community survival spaces for queer people: they were "a trap and a refuge." Canaday looked at government and corporate archives, conducted over 150 oral history interviews, and combed through the personal papers of dozens of queer workers; she provides plenty evidence from the historical record for her central argument, the theorization of gay work as a “form of labor.”
So, what is Canaday's central conceit of “gay labor?” She attempts to think systemically about what conditioned work for queer people, how it was conditioned, to what end. In the postwar golden age, gay labor was defined by the precarity (that is, mobility, vulnerability, and disposability) of gay, lesbian and gender non-conforming workers in the primary labor sector. This precarity was created in large by the spectre of the lavender scare and the larger state project of criminalization of homosexuality and gender nonconformity, by the fear of queer people usually knowing at least one other queer worker who lost their job because of their homosexuality; these state policies were the subject of Canaday’s first book, the Straight State. In Queer Career, the second part of the diptych, Canaday lays out how "queer" careers could be in a "straight state" for queer people – how the vulnerability codified by the state was exploited by employers, as a “release valve” in the Fordist system that otherwise relied on unionized labor, a family wage, and loyalty of (mostly white, male) workers to a single company, in exchange for dropping radical labor tactics like strikes, all of which was expensive and only worked during the postwar boom, more or less. In the eyes of employers, gay workers didn't carry the additional expense and complication of a spouse, and so could be relocated to other places and worked for longer hours. Further, because gay workers usually knew at least one other queer person who lost their job in relation to homosexuality, and/or was relegated to secondary or tertiary employment sectors -- where most gay workers were actually concentrated -- they could be fired without putting up a fight, relocated, forced to work longer hours, and employed for lower wages in exchange for being employed in the primary sector at all. (Page 68)
This latter exchange was the midcentury "bargain:" capital got a more exploitable segment of the labor force, a necessary Fordist release valve (responding to the state's codification of the legal vulnerability of queer people), for which it offered queer people a "dont ask, dont tell" sort of toleration in primary sector workplaces in exchange. The bargain is Canaday's main argument against the "common sense" notion that gay workers were not economically exploited, and only faced discrimination in the cultural and social sphere. The bargain prefigured a couple important subsequent developments: the extension of precarity to the majority of workers from the mid 70-s onwards, and – I'm not sure Canaday says this directlly, but - it also prefigured "the business case," the makeshift d-alliance of the corporate world with its queer workers from the 90s onwards.
The business world had been somewhat receptive to queer workers seeking protection from discrimination and the labor movement had been too, both more so than the state. As labor unions started losing power, focusing most of their efforts on defending and preserving the gains they had not yet lost, they became less receptive to queer workers; while the state remained at best quietly and minimally receptive, and there had been precedent for an arrangement with business -- which was seized on by both queer workers and employers.
The “business case” was the cause of what is, to me, tied for the most striking reversal (inversion?) identified in the book: queer workers in corporate contexts changing from least visible in the white collar context from 1945-75 or so, and the most visible from 90s onward. What ties this reversal for most striking one is one Canaday identifies in a footnote: in working class lesbian couples, the primary breadwinner being the femme, sometimes through sex work, with the butch being less of a wage-earner, more responsible for the reproductive labors of the household (Page 98, footnote 161) – another plus for Canaday’s contention that in prioritizing the “aesthetic and romantic,” that is, “cultural” aspects of queer history as separate from the workplace, historians have left a gap in our understanding of the economic aspects of queer history.
My favorite part was inevitably Frank Kameny’s politics of annoyance: sending Kafka to government lawyers, flaunting the lack of a law degree as an advantage, and so on.
July 12, 2023
Honestly, I thought there was a lot of valuable information here. Narratives that might not otherwise break through of how things were. It's important to have them, but the way they were explained, quite frankly, made them so uninteresting. I'm not sure why, as this subject matter usually has me rivetted, but it felt like the stories of those the author interviewed were muted and just...boring.
I wanted to like it more than I did, and I think it's important, but it was a slog for me.
I wanted to like it more than I did, and I think it's important, but it was a slog for me.
June 7, 2025
I picked up Queer Career to understand how I, as a queer woman working in corporate America, am connected to the labor and activism of past generations. What I didn’t expect was how much of that progress took place within major tech corporations—not because they embraced LGBTQetc. workers, but because they found ways to extract value from them while offering limited, often strategic inclusion. Canaday’s research is layered and compelling, revealing how queerness was often tolerated or instrumentalized rather than genuinely supported. It’s a powerful reminder that capitalism continues to profit from marginalized identities while failing to address deeper systemic inequities. A thoughtful, necessary read—especially timely during Pride, as we reflect on both how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
research
August 29, 2022⤑ research tag: in an effort to organise my shelves, I’m going to be labelling the books I’m using for study purposes as I tend to dip in and out of these.
Very much looking forward to this after reading The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America!
Very much looking forward to this after reading The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America!
December 27, 2023
really excellent. such a pleasure to read a book that refines your entire understanding of half a century
April 19, 2024
So that's why I feel that way! And other such revelations.
April 18, 2023
A fascinating, detailed, and meaningful look at the experiences of gay, lesbian, and, to a lesser extent, trans Americans in the labor force from the 1950s to today. Part labor history, part ethnography, and part legal history, the book is engrossing and approachable for the lay reader despite its clear academic bona fides and extensive footnotes. I found insightful the themes that Canaday identified through her extensive interviews of subjects who experienced working as queer people in the US labor market during all of the covered periods, as well as her clearly in-depth archival research. There were a few points where, as someone without any background in the field, I would have liked slightly more explanation of existing academic theories, but overall, these references did not detract from my experience. The chapters focusing on Frank Kameny’s challenge of the Federal government after being fired and on the changes the AIDS epidemic brought in the 80s were particularly interesting.
June 3, 2025
While Canaday notes that service occupations were notably perceived as queer occupations. Despite cultural associations between service sector jobs and queerness, Canaday asserts that LGBT people held a diverse set of occupations but had to suppress their sexuality within many positions. Early postwar presidential administrations sought to expel queer people from federal positions, in what is known as the Lavender Scare. In the development of the neoliberal post industrialist American economy led to employers to exploit queer employees to work longer hours, fearing that employers could expose their sexuality if they pried into their private lives. Queer Career relies on oral histories and extensive archival research into collections focused on labor reports. Her book serves as a foundational book on the interconnection of queer identity and labor in the twentieth century.
April 10, 2024
Fascinating book that connects LGBTQ history to the history of labor and capitalism. The book makes the case that LGBTQ folks were not as closeted in the 1950s-1960s as we've assumed, based on scholarship about the Lavendar Scare. And, secondly, that gay employees were forerunners of today's precariat. Canaday weaves from this a complicated argument that in the post-Fordist age the vulnerability of LGBTQ employees made them appealing to corporations that ended up granting them major rights. I taught the book in my grad course--not everyone was convinced--but all saw the book as an important one, well worth analyzing and debating.
March 5, 2025
This was a really interesting book. It goes through the history of queer people in workplaces and queer workplaces, exploring both the personal experiences of individuals as well as the legal and policy backdrops.
The author has a nice ‘voice’ in the book, making the research approachable and easy to understand, while still being thorough and well supported.
I learned a lot and I’d be interested to read a follow-up piece as well see things change over the next 5 years or so.
Well worth the read!
The author has a nice ‘voice’ in the book, making the research approachable and easy to understand, while still being thorough and well supported.
I learned a lot and I’d be interested to read a follow-up piece as well see things change over the next 5 years or so.
Well worth the read!
April 1, 2025
This book is certainly very interesting and delves into a very understudied realm of history: American Queer employment. However, at times, this book became speculative and also lacked some source information that I would have liked to see. This book relies heavily on anonymous interviews to sustain the narrative, which I welcome, but the processes of interviews are not clearly stated, including cohort demographics, and there is a lack of people of color within the interviewed groups. I understand this is newer research, but it left me wanting more.
July 31, 2024
Very well researched book and good read.
August 13, 2025
Thoroughly researched and detailed, the stories still kept me interested and humanized the facts. A both sad and hopeful history and unfortunately still very relevant.
November 3, 2025
Perceptive, well-researched, and persuasive
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews