Here’s a narrative jewel from Margot Canaday’s stunning new book Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America: Canaday is interviewing a queer woman who drove a cab in Buffalo during the years following World War II. Apparently, taxi driving was a common profession for lesbians at the time. In fact, the cabbie believed that half the drivers in the company were queer. “The owner liked to hire lesbians—it was a transient job, but lesbians tended to stay. ‘Got any friends?’ he would ask. ‘Send them in.’” It was the kind of job, the driver told Canaday, that allowed her to live life the way she wanted. The informal nature of the work gave her the flexibility to socialize in gay spaces and to present herself authentically without fear of reprisal at work. During her years as a driver “she wore pants, a shirt, and a binder to work.” (P. 83.)
If you’re anything like me—a reader familiar with the standard narrative of the development of postwar liberalism—this story is disorienting. Driving a cab in postwar Buffalo was a congenial profession for lesbians? So congenial that half the employees were queer? So congenial that the boss actively tried to recruit lesbian drivers? So congenial that drivers felt comfortable being out at work? Wasn’t this the era of the Lavender Scare, when rampant homophobia and government persecution drove queer Americans out of the workforce and deep into the closet? This story is just one of many convincing, counterintuitive pieces of evidence that substantiate Canaday’s central claim: When you look at the world of “queer careers” through the lens of the Lavender Scare, you don’t see the employment experiences of most gay and lesbian workers. In fact, when you closely examine these experiences, as Canaday has done with an unprecedented degree of detail, you see a very different story. You see that for many gay and lesbian workers, the workplace became less hospitable as the twentieth century wore on.
By demonstrating this fact, Canaday is not painting some sort of rose-tinted image of a sexually egalitarian past. Far from it. In fact, the relationship between the social marginalization of queer people and the nature of their work lives is the fundamental story that Queer Career tells. The book traces the path that gay and lesbian workers took through the workplace in the second half of the twentieth century, showing the dramatic changes in the nature of their employment experiences. Canaday begins with an examination of a bifurcated world of “Gay Labor” in the years immediately after World War Two. There were “straight jobs”—professional, high-status, white-collar work—that were available to (mostly male) queer employees if they were willing to enter an implicit bargain with their employers. Employees would pretend to not be gay, and their employers would pretend to not notice that they were. Thus, contrary to the received historical wisdom, Canaday shows that gay and lesbian employees did not need to descend deep into the closet to get some of the financial and status benefits of America’s postwar economic boom. They simply had to participate in the demeaning pretense of “don’t ask/don’t tell.”
It’s obvious why many queer workers would embrace this bargain, but what was in it for the employers? Canaday’s answer to this question is compelling. America’s employers were not secret homophiles. Instead, they recognized that gay and lesbian employees “were valuable because they were vulnerable.” (P. 68.) They were workers without legal protections, living in a world of fear, where public employment was often unavailable and where they might be fired for no reason other than their choice of romantic companions. The law thus made the employment lives of queer workers especially precarious. In the years following the Second World War, many employers were happy to take advantage of that precarity. Gay and lesbian employees would work extra hours, take crap assignments, not complain if they were paid less, and not make a fuss if they were dismissed. Gay men did not have to be paid a family wage. Lesbians would not marry, become pregnant, and drop out of the workplace at a time that was inconvenient to their employers. In a postwar work world that was characterized by the expense and rigidity of the family wage and the collective bargaining agreement, queer employees were a “pressure-release valve” that allowed employers to reduce costs and increase efficiency. (P. 63.)
Of course, not all workers wished to take the benefits of this bargain. After all, it was premised on repression and exploitation: hiding your intimate relationships, comporting your behavior and appearance to straight norms, and accepting less pay for more work. For these workers, there existed a second world of work: “queer jobs.” Some, like that of the cab driver, were low-status, low-pay positions in industrial or peripheral labor markets. Others were in professions where, even in buttoned-up postwar America, “queerness” was part of the “package and brand”: hairdressers, cruise ship employees, and department store salesmen, for example. (P. 83.) Other jobs—in libraries, the garment industry, or the performing arts—were less queer-branded but had reputations as queer occupations. Finally, there were jobs within the gay demimonde: the employees of gay bars, drag performers, and sex workers. What this diverse set of jobs had in common was that they allowed workers to opt out of the bargain that the straight workplace required. These jobs might pay less, provide few opportunities for professional advancement, and have low status, but they nonetheless allowed gay workers to be more open with their sexuality. They were “pockets of relative safety,” that allowed workers to express their identity. (P. 100.)
Having described this world of queer labor, Canaday turns her attention to how it changed in the era of gay liberation, the period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, bookended by the emancipatory impulses of Stonewall and the beginning of the AIDS crisis. She details the hard fought but largely unsuccessful effort to forge legal employment protections for gay and lesbian workers analogous to the prohibitions of race and sex discrimination embodied in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These legal battles occurred as the gay liberation movement pursued nonlegal strategies to empower gay and lesbian Americans. Ironically, the most prominent of these strategies—abandoning the closet—had the effect of making work more precarious for many queer workers. While the postwar bargain did not require a complete retreat into the closet, it did require a kind of discretion that was contrary to the liberationist ethos. Consequently, as more workers came out, employers abandoned the bargain. Indeed, even for workers who wished to keep to its terms, the rise of gay liberation increased the precariousness of their jobs. Employers worried about hiring gay and lesbian employees lest they accidentally employ someone who might adopt a liberationist posture, abandoning the straight norms of appearance and behavior that the bargain required. Thus, employers increasingly viewed any sign of possible queerness—an odd haircut, an unmarried thirty-five-year old, too many phone calls at work from same-sex friends—as a reason to fire a worker, or not hire them in the first place. Like the civil rights movements for people of color and straight women, gay liberation generated “a revolution in consciousness,” demonstrated by a public pride in one’s identity and demands for equal treatment. Unlike those other liberation struggles, however, gay liberation had no parallel “revolution in law.” (P. 149.) Lesbian and gay Americans had to assert their rights in the workplace without legal protections.
The AIDS epidemic increased the cost of this lack of legal protection dramatically. AIDS destroyed what remained of the postwar bargain. Panicked fears of contagion and concerns about the costs of employing queer workers—at risk of falling ill and dying—led to an increase in homophobia and discrimination in the workplace. While Canaday demonstrates, in some of Queer Career’s most moving passages, that the epidemic created deeply meaningful work for members of the community in healthcare and legal advocacy, she also shows how it drove many workers back into the closet. At height of the epidemic, a gay employee’s runny nose or a day off to care for a sick partner could result in dismissal. In the absence of meaningful anti-discrimination laws, the closet became the only option for many queer workers.
The lack of a “revolution in law” to protect the rights of gay and lesbian employees had another effect. If the government was not going to protect those rights, perhaps turning to private actors—the employers themselves—would be more effective. In Canaday’s final chapter, she demonstrates that this was, in fact, the choice that many queer workers made. By the end of the twentieth century, it was a select group of private employers, acting in response to pressures from their gay and lesbian employees, that provided a measure of dignity, recognition, and meaningful employment benefits to queer workers. Starting in the technology sector and in businesses in more diverse cities, employers began to support their queer employees. They slowly and haltingly recognized queer employee groups, celebrated Pride Week, and targeted gay consumers. Eventually, they put their money whether their mouths were by providing benefits to their employees’ domestic partners. Canaday shows that the recognition of these benefits was not easily achieved noblesse oblige by forward thinking employers. Nor was it the cooptation of the gay rights movement by cynical corporations. Instead, it was the result of grassroots organizing by workers who were willing to take the substantial risk of engaging in queer advocacy despite the lack of any legal protections. It also required connecting gay liberation to fin-de-siecle political economy. By supporting gay rights, the advocates argued, a business could retain its employees, find new markets, and reap the economic benefits of a diverse workforce. Canaday makes the irony palpable. For gays and lesbians in the United States, the most effective way to gain rights at work was to “disassociate” their movement from rights and law altogether. Supporting your queer employees “was about business efficiency and becoming an employer of choice.” It was about “being best equipped to tap into the resources of an increasingly diverse workforce.” (P. 255.)
The analytic pay-off of Canaday’s narrative is enormous. Her discovery of the postwar bargain and its decline should transform the narrative of postwar liberalism. Queer Career also speaks to debates about the nature of the gay rights movement: its alleged domination by whiteness and affluence and its alleged subservience to consumer capitalism. Both claims are ones that Canaday’s narrative convincingly refutes. For legal historians, her descriptions of the campaigns to expand civil rights legislation, combat governmental employment discrimination, and use existing civil rights statutes to curb discrimination against HIV-positive individuals are presented with a degree of detail missing from the existing literature. Even more significant is the way Canaday uses these stories to explain the mechanisms of queer employment precarity and its connection to postwar capitalism. The impact of these mechanisms, as she elegantly points out, should inform contemporary thinking about all workers. After all, Queer Career convincingly demonstrates that the characteristics of queer careers since 1945—profound imbalances of bargaining power, episodic gig work, invasive monitoring, employer demands for flexibility—sound an awful lot like the neoliberal workplace that most workers, gay and straight, inhabit today.
As powerful as Canaday’s arguments are, the triumph of this book is in the individual stories it tells. Queer Career is, first and foremost, a book is about the lives of working people. It is a book brimming with workers, some found in traditional documentary sources, and others made visible by the more than 150 interviews that Canaday conducted. At its center are joyous, heartbreaking, funny, cruel, and fundamentally human stories. We learn about Frank Kameny, the astronomer who used “the politics of annoyance” (P. 114) to challenge the federal government’s antigay hiring practices; about Ginny Berson, a founder of the Olivia Records Collective, a record company that catalogued its recordings with numbers prefaced by “LF,” which stood for “lesbian feminist”; and about Cliff Morrison, the clinical coordinator of Ward 5B, San Francisco General Hospital pathbreaking in-patient AIDS unit. We also meet hundreds of anonymous clerk-typists, computers scientists, bartenders, and project managers for whom work was a central component of their identity. Lost, but now found by Canaday, she has illuminated their lives to show how the history of queer work is a “history of vulnerability,” but also a history of how work of all kinds dignifies and gives meaning to life. (P. 280.)
