Abstract
In the closing pages of Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America, the legal and political historian Margot Canaday shares details about the work life of Aimee Stephens, who was fired from her funeral director role after she revealed her decision to begin a gender transition. She also was a plaintiff in a landmark 2020 U.S. Supreme Court case that ruled that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protected gay and transgender people from employment discrimination. During her seven-year legal battle, Stephens and her wife were “financially devastated . . . They sold two vehicles, a camping trailer, and a piano to cover their bills. Still, there were times when they didn’t eat” (p. 283). Furthermore, Stephens sent out “forty to fifty résumés to area funeral homes” and was turned down each time despite her 30 years of experience under her previous (male) name (p. 284). She took a part-time job in a restaurant before finally landing a low-paying histology assistant position in a hospital, for which she was overqualified. Tragically, she passed away just weeks before the Supreme Court ruling. But in sharing the details of Stephens’s life, Canaday shines a bright and much-needed light on the post-World War II working lives of sexual minorities in the United States.
This trailblazing and solidly researched book not only captures some of these lives but also argues that our post-industrial economy was built, in part, on the precarious economic position of queer people in the mid-twentieth century. To support her argument, Canaday relies mainly on a multitude of archival sources and more than 150 interviews with gay and lesbian workers born between the 1930s and 1950s, who were at the peak of their careers in the post-war period. (The transgender experience is lightly treated.) She is careful to note that she does not argue that queer people were in a “more” precarious position than women and people of color were (p. 12). Instead, she sees queer workers during that period as harbingers of the precarity to come because they have “long been viewed by employers as ‘unattached,’ contingent, and flexibly deployable, the very opposite of Fordism’s prototypical breadwinners” (p. 272). While this economic vulnerability has always been evident for queer workers who were employed in “secondary-sector jobs” (like retail), the book also suggests that it historically permeated “primary-sector jobs” (like corporate offices) (p. 12). Because gay men had everything to lose if they were outed and lesbians needed to be financially independent, employers could get more of what they wanted by leveraging their workers’ queer status. By embedding these personal trajectories of economic vulnerability into the story of broader shifting relations between employers and their workers, Canaday humanizes queer workers’ struggles and grounds them in their everyday work experiences. She makes us want to learn even more about Stephens and the many others we encounter in her book.
This excellent study contains many critical insights for scholars of labor markets, careers, and organizations. First, it documents queer workers’ employment dynamics, not only in queer worlds of work (Chapter 2) and federal jobs (Chapter 3) but also in the private sector (Chapters 4, 5, and 6). Since Allan Bérubé’s 1990 book, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two, detailed, for instance, lesbians’ and gay men’s concentration in the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps and hospital corpsmen, navy yeomen, or chaplain’s assistant military jobs, respectively, we have learned much about distinct queer worlds of work. Moreover, David Johnson’s 2006 The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government extensively documented discrimination against queer employees in federal jobs. The novelty of Canaday’s inquiry is its parallel focus on funeral homes, software companies, run-of-the-mill small businesses, and other private employment contexts.
Second, Queer Career discusses the circumstances that might lead some queer workers to opt in or out of pursuing careers. As Canaday explains, “lesbian breadwinners [in the 1960s] needed better, higher-paying jobs than married women to survive economically” since they could not rely on their husband’s income, thus making these women by “necessity . . . ‘seriously committed to work’” (pp. 14–15). By contrast, a surprising number of educated gay men around the same time held “menial positions and steadfastly avoid[ed] engaging in any sort of work that would demand a greater share of responsibility and growth,” for fear of intensified scrutiny that might lead to dismissal (p. 76). This discussion raises the possibility that today, some segments of the workforce might similarly avoid careers, though perhaps for other reasons. More broadly, the book expands our understanding of career trajectories—queer or not—by suggesting the many ways in which people construct meanings and guardrails in their work lives.
Third, Canaday spotlights employers’ distinct roles in promoting inclusion at work. Chapter 6 describes in depth the policies that, for example, AT&T, Bell Labs, and the software company Lotus successfully spearheaded in the 1980s to better address the needs of queer employees. These often-overlooked efforts—which contrast sharply with the response of the funeral home where Stephens worked—deserve to be recorded and analyzed. In addition, rarely are the key roles of allies properly documented. Here, Canaday describes the institutional change efforts of all those involved, including allies like Ethel Batten at Bell Labs, who cared for a beloved nephew while he was dying of AIDS, and Janet Axelrod at Lotus, who participated in the women’s liberation movement and antiwar activism, prior to their helping draft queer-inclusive corporate policies.
What truly makes the book so engaging are the layered insights that different readers can treasure. As suggested above, the book offers clear propositions that other researchers (including social movement scholars) can test and explore. Canaday posits, for instance, that businesses’ contemporary embrace of queer workers has as much (if not more) to do with employers’ historical ability to extract added efforts from these workers in exchange for little security or compensation as it does with morality. At the same time, however, the intimate stories of discrimination and support that specific queer people encountered at work linger in our minds. For example, we read about the attempts of Frank Kameny—the pioneering gay rights activist who unsuccessfully appealed his dismissal from his position as an astronomer in the U.S. Army Map Services—to get his job back, including requesting a statement from an eminent psychiatrist. The supportive psychiatrist drafted one and tried to depict Kameny’s “sexual experimentation” as evidence of a scientific rather than a homosexual mind (p. 110). (According to this view, homosexual relations were only an experiment in an otherwise so-called normalized life.) That, of course, did not fly with Kameny’s opponents and left him mostly unemployed for more than a decade and in a constant state of “bleak material existence . . . his teeth were a mess, his clothes disheveled, his house in disrepair,” as evidenced by his correspondence with his mother (p. 108).
The book’s epilogue, which deals with the most recent legal developments on LGBTQ rights, is one that Canaday might have preferred not to write. Yet, the book could not have gone to print without acknowledging the current setbacks faced by queer workers, particularly transgender ones, in the United States. Recent Supreme Court rulings, state laws, and political polarization regarding queer rights reinforce Canaday’s overall argument that discrimination is not merely a culture war but also carries significant economic implications. Today, people at risk of losing their jobs due to these legal changes face similarly high economic penalties as those that Kameny and Stephens incurred. Being able to practice as an astronomer, funeral director, or anything else one might hope for is still not guaranteed to everyone.