The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (review)

Canaday’s study feels so indispensable and fresh that one can hardly imagine getting along without it. Rooted in exhaustive research and written in a pitch-perfect style, The Straight State charts how the American state policed and produced homosexuality as a legal category much more vigorously than its European counterparts. While attributing this American exceptionalism to the synchronous rise of sexology and American state building, Canaday’s primary focus is on rewriting national narratives of sexuality, turning away from the “local studies” of individual cities and regions that have characterized much of US LGBT historical scholarship since John D’Emilio’s landmark Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (1983).¹ It also marks a methodological departure from the scholarship of Eithne Luibhéid, Allen Bérubé, and David Johnson, which considers sexuality in relation to a single branch of the federal government (immigration, the military, and the civil service, respectively).² The Straight State enriches and synthesizes this work by examining multiple areas of government. One of the major payoffs of these shifts is the chronicling of state regulation of homosexuality prior to World War II and McCarthyism. While previous histories have charted a sharp crackdown on homosexuality growing out of increasing gay and lesbian visibility around the era of World War II, Canaday extends the reach of a federally policed narrative of sexuality further back in time.³

The book is divided into two parts, which are helpfully thought of in relation to Hugh Heclo’s phrase (quoted in the introduction) that states “puzzle before they power” (3). The first part, “Nascent Policing,” corresponds to the state’s “puzzling” as it determined how to negotiate what it perceived to be the new problem of gender and sexual nonconformity; the second part, “Explicit Regulation,” corresponds to the enactment of power, the deployment of regulatory measures to ensure the conjoining of heterosexuality and citizenship. Each of the two parts contains a chapter on immigration, welfare, and the military, enabling Canaday to chart a chronological narrative of the state’s response to sexuality as well as an arc of internal development.

Canaday’s first chapter argues that as early as 1909 the US Bureau of Immigration was concerned with homosexuality. Even as it was at the vanguard of the federal regulation of homosexuality, the bureau was relatively inept at addressing what it perceived to be the problem. Its primary tool for expelling homosexual immigrants and citizens—the “likely to become a public charge” clause—was inexact (21). While this vague charge had a low burden of proof and could be wielded against many immigrants (as the preponderance of immigrants was poor), it also linked homosexuality to poverty and racial degeneration, rendering it ineffective against more affluent immigrants.

The first half of the book is concerned with mapping the US government’s two-pronged approach to homosexuality, both retooling provisions already in place to police homosexuality, like the public charge clause, while also hiding its knowledge of the problem from public view. In chapter 2, for example, Canaday argues that the military employed its “traditional criminal procedure” (58)—the court-martial—not to “remove perverts from the force” (77) but rather to manage overt and violent displays of sodomy. At the same time, the military also hid its considerable knowledge about homosexual practice by blaming homosexuality on civilians. Chapter 3, similarly, argues that two analogous New Deal programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Federal Transient Program (FTP), with nearly identical goals differed dramatically in their ability to manage homosexuality. While both programs featured gender-segregated camps where men lived and worked together, the CCC avoided charges of homosexuality by positioning its unmarried male workers as “soldiers-in-training rather than reliefers” (93). In contrast, the FTP was overwhelmed from its inception by its association with “the distinctive sexual subculture of hoboes and bums in which homosexuality featured prominently” (92). One striking aspect of the first half of this book is the...