Twentieth-Century Transformations: Sexualities Defined and Sexual Expression Expanded

Two excellent and important monographs, Margot Canaday’s The Straight State and Leigh Ann Wheeler’s How Sex Became a Civil Liberty, explore different aspects of how sexuality and sexual expression were defined and redefined over the course of the twentieth century in the United States. Canaday focuses on the role of the central state—especially the role of bureaucrats in branches of the federal government such as the military, immigration, and welfare—in defining and then policing the category of homosexuality. In contrast, Wheeler highlights the role of civil liberties lawyers, especially those in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in shifting public opinion and the perceptions of Supreme Court justices regarding the legal and social acceptability of an increasingly broad range of sexual expression.

Margot Canaday’s The Straight State starts from the premise that, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the American state was still relatively small in comparison to European states and that the bureaucratic state grew at the same moment when homosexuality was being defined and homophobia was increasing. Canaday argues that the state helped produce the category of homosexuality and set the boundaries for citizenship, in part by setting up “a vast apparatus for policing homosexuality” (p. 2). By the 1940s and 1950s, federal policies explicitly banned homosexuals from welfare benefits, military service, and access to immigration and/or citizenship. Canaday cautions against historians’ tendency to attribute too narrowly these more punitive policies and increased homophobia to McCarthyism’s “lavender scare.” Rather, she points to a much longer and steadier process of “state-building” based on government bureaucrats’ attempts to create the category of homosexuality.

Canaday argues that, in the early decades of the twentieth century, federal bureaucrats played a significant role in defining homosexuality and in creating a “straight state.” For example, immigration policies allowed inspectors to refuse entry to those who were physically disabled and those identified as “sexually perverse.” Linking immorality and economic dependency together, officials argued that both groups should be excluded on the grounds that they were “likely to become a public charge” (p. 21). By associating citizenship with men’s ability to care for their dependents, unmarried immigrant men without dependents could be characterized as less manly and thus as potentially “perverse.” All immigration slowed during World War I, yet official attempts to bar homosexuals reappeared in military guidelines that tried to screen out “sex perverts” who might corrupt other soldiers. The government in this way sought to prevent the all-male military from being seen as an inherently corrupting, perverse space.

Fears of homosexuality also shaped New Deal programs, as the government confronted the problem of homeless transients who were labeled by federal officials as “non-family people” or the “unattached” (p. 91). The Federal Transient Program (FTP) was created in response to complaints by town and city leaders that invading hordes of hoboes were looking for food and shelter while increasing crime rates and disturbing the local populace. The FTP took already homeless young boys and older men and put them all together in isolated shelters without productive work where, critics feared, older men could sexually seduce or even rape the young boys. Not surprisingly, the program ended within two years under a cloud of charges regarding sexual degeneracy and “unnatural” male dependency. In contrast, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) served a more popularly approved function of preventing transiency in young men. From 1933 until the United States entered World War II, the CCC gave young men productive work in a regimented, military-like environment while requiring them to behave as economic providers by sending a portion of their wages to a dependent or dependents each month.

In part two of her book, Canaday examines the intersection of federal military policy and the welfare state during...