The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America by Margot Canaday. Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America series. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. 296, 6 illustrations. $29.95 cloth

Abelove, Henry

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CriticismVolume 52Issue 2 Honoring Eve: A Special Issue on the Work ofEve Kosofsky SedgwickArticle 212010A Moderately Gay HistoryHenry AbeloveWesleyan University, habelove@wesleyan.eduFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticismRecommended CitationAbelove, Henry (2010) "A Moderately Gay History," Criticism: Vol. 52: Iss. 2, Article 21.Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol52/iss2/21Criticism, Spring 2010, Vol. 52, No. 2, pp. 339–341. ISSN: 0011-1589. 339© 2011 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201-1309.A MoDerAtely GAy HIStoryHenry AbeloveThe Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America by Margot Canaday. Politics and Society in twentieth Century America series. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. 296, 6 illustrations. $29.95 cloth.this book is novel and bold. It is also tediously overly detailed. Some of the detail should surely have been consigned to articles in specialist journals and left there. Despite the dense underbrush of particulars and instances, though, the overall argument stands out clearly and deserves close atten-tion.In very summary form, the ar-gument is this: During the era stretching from early in the twen-tieth century to the cold war, the American state grew in power and reach. During these same years, the newly discovered notion of ho-mosexuality, developed by sexolo-gists, “exploded on the American continent.” these two develop-ments, operating “in tandem” (2) led federal bureaucrats to endeavor to regulate and police homosexual-ity. At first their regulatory and po-licing work was “anemic.” they still lacked a clear analytical basis for dealing with what they saw as “the problem” of homosexuality, and they tried to get at it, without targeting it specifically, through broad rulings on matters such as “poverty, disorder, violence, or crime.” Gradually, however, as the federal bureaucrats became more numerous and influential, they also acquired a kind of “conceptual mastery” over the homosexuality they wanted to regulate and police. Starting in the mid-1940s, they did target it specifically and “overtly” (3). this targeting helped to create 340 HeNry ABeloVethe homosexual “identity” (4) in the contemporary sense and also deprived those identified as homo-sexual of full entitlement to Ameri-can citizenship. When American homosexual persons—whose iden-tity was created, as Canaday main-tains, in some considerable measure by the American state—came to organize and agitate in their own interests, their goal, never wholly abandoned, has been, and still is, the achievement of citizenship rights in full.In representing the American state, Margot Canaday concen-trates particularly on the armed services, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the Veterans Administration (VA), the Federal emergency relief Admin-istration (FerA), and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Her treatment of the armed services owes much to previous work by Allan Berube and leisa Meyer; on the INS, to previous work by Marc Stein and Shannon Minter; and on New Deal and post–World War II welfare policy, to work by a host of feminist historians, perhaps espe-cially lizabeth Cohen. But Cana-day’s findings are nevertheless saliently new in several ways. First, she directs attention away from the 1940s and 1950s, long a focus of study on the American state as-sault on homosexuality, to the early years of the twentieth century. It was then, she says, that U.S. fed-eral bureaucrats commenced their efforts to regulate homosexuality, sometimes inclining to tolerance, sometimes to severity. And she in-sists that only by comprehending what the bureaucrats did then, in those years of diffuse regulation, can we hope to understand ade-quately the far more targeted reg-ulation and policing of the later period. Second, Canaday signifi-cantly revises the major conclu-sions of feminist historiography on New Deal and post–World War II welfare policy. this historiogra-phy demonstrated that welfare policy advantaged men while it disadvantaged women, that it was in effect sexist. Canaday demon-strates that it was heterosexist, as well. third and perhaps most im-portant, Canaday brings to her in-quiry a firm grasp of the ideas of modern political science concern-ing state bureaucracy—how it op-erates, how it acquires and copes with new knowledge in the course of daily work. In deploying these ideas to explain what she sees as the paced conceptual development of the American state regulation of homosexuality, she does something entirely fresh.All these novelties are fascinat-ing. yet some irksome questions remain. Why should we simply ac-cept that the federal bureaucrats developed, in considerable mea-sure created, the homosexual “identity” through their daily ex-perience of the work of regula-tion? Why couldn’t their shifting conception of homosexuality have derived rather, or primarily, from  oN CANADAy’S THE STRAIGHT STATE 341their experience of the shifting representations of it in the culture all around them—from fiction, po-etry, film, journalism, advertise-ment? Canaday gives hardly any attention to shifts in cultural repre-sentations and doesn’t ask how they may have influenced or even shaped concurrent shifts in bu-reaucratic perspective. Another question: Is the modern homosex-ual “identity”—whatever that may be—a distinctively American phe-nomenon? If it isn’t, how much credence can we concede to an his-torical argument that gives so much weight to the force of a dis-tinctively American state regime in the producing of that “iden-tity?”on one crucial issue, Canaday’s argument is mistaken. A full enti-tlement to American citizenship hasn’t always been a goal or even a desideratum for gay politics. Cana-day traces a poignant continuity of interest in transforming federal policy from the “earliest of homo-phile protests” (262) through the 1979 National March on Washing-ton through the federal civil rights bill proposed by the National Gay task Force and up to and includ-ing the present-day struggle for equality for lgbtq (lesbian/gay/ bisexual/transgender/queer) peo-ple in the American armed ser-vices. All this is true, but there is a countertradition, too—a counter-tradition of lgbtq agitators who never hoped to declaim Civis Rom-anus sum. this countertradition includes many lgbtq antistatist an-archists. It also includes most of the American gay liberationists of the late 1960s and early 1970s. For these liberationists, America was typically understood to be actually Amerika. to share in it, to belong to it fully, was immeasurably less im-portant to them than to express their vehement disaffection from it and to adequately explain the grounds and reasons of their disaf-fection. For them, as for many oth-ers of their contemporaries, the 1960s had been, as the historian Marilyn young puts it, “centrally about the recognition . . . that the country in which they thought they lived—peaceful, generous, honorable—did not exist and never had.”1Henry Abelove, the author of Deep Gossip (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), is Osborne Professor of English and Professor of American Studies at Wesleyan University.Note1. Marilyn young, foreword to Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New york: routledge, 2002), 1–14, quotation on 3.

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