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I had intended to write about something else for this month’s edition of LGBT Literature, but I have not quite finished the book I want to review. So, as I often do in these kinds of situations, I turned to my bookshelf for inspiration. Also serving as “inspiration” was the recent attack by the current occupant of the White House on transgender service members. I wanted to find a book that was at least somewhat relevant in light of current events, and my eyes scanned over some obvious contenders like Allan Berube’s Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (that might be a future LGBT Literature diary). But then, I settled on a book that I’ve used in other diaries but have never fully reviewed here in this series: Margot Canaday’s The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (2011). While Canaday’s study may not seem to be directly connected with transgender military service or Trump’s latest atrocity, it is relevant in that it traces the growth of the U.S. state, which rose in tandem with the federal government’s increasing desire and power to regulate gender and sexual conformity.
Aside from being incredibly useful to understanding how and why the U.S. state became so concerned with (and effective at) regulating sexuality and gender by the mid-twentieth century, The Straight State is just a masterful piece of scholarship. It might amuse Canaday if she knew that, in grad school, my peers and I formed a kind of informal Margot Canaday fan club and often referenced her book as a model of good historical study—and the kind of work we wanted our dissertations to be (I think we all probably came short in the end). “Well, it’s no Straight State,” we’d often say when discussing other seminar books. So yes, I’m a little biased going into this. I’ve wanted to review The Straight State for LGBT Literature for a long time, but I always ended up settling on other books because I feared I wouldn’t do it justice. And I probably won’t, be forewarned. But I’ll give it my best shot, focusing on Canaday’s main arguments and contributions. This review will barely scratch the surface, however—I’ll leave the rest for you to read on your own.
Canaday begins The Straight State with a bold statement:
Measured against other Western democracies at the dawn of the twentieth century, the American state—slow to develop, small in size, and limited in capability—stood out as distinctive. Fifty years later, a period of expansion had produced a state that was finally European in its heft, but still exceptional in another way: in terms of its homophobia. “There appears to be no other major culture in the world,” Alfred Kinsey wrote in 1953, in which homosexual relationships were “so severely penalized.”
And those who have even a passing knowledge of LGBT history can point to the many ways in which homosexuality was harshly restricted and punished by both state and federal government bodies: sodomy laws, police harassment and brutality, discharges from the military, systematic purging from the federal government in the Cold War era, the list goes on. Canaday then poses the question that drives her study (and partially answers her own question):
It seems a paradox. How did a state that was so late in coming construct such a vast apparatus for policing homosexuality, and why?
[...]
Unlike comparable European states, which were well established before sexologists “discovered” the homosexual in the late nineteenth century, the American bureaucracy matured during the same years that scientific and popular awareness of the pervert exploded on the American continent.
The conventional explanation for the rise of extreme U.S. state repression of homosexuality has been that, as gays and lesbians became more visible after World War II (see Berube’s book linked above), the state took a greater interest in cracking down on homosexuality. Canaday’s study, however, underscores that homosexuality and sexual/gender nonconformity were far from new in the minds of federal officials by the mid-twentieth century. The federal government was more than aware of such “deviance” well before World War II—it was just slow to build an apparatus that could effectively repress homosexuals. Canaday continues:
This sluggish federal response loses some of its mystery if we center the processes of twentieth-century state-building, and the way that states must “puzzle before they power.” Federal officials were confronted with evidence of sex and gender nonconformity as they did the things that bureaucrats do—whether keeping undesirables out of the country, peopling an army, or distributing resources among the citizenry [bolding mine]. But they initially encountered this evidence without a clear conceptual framework to analyze the problem. Even so, they worried about those whose bodies or behaviors seemed perverse to them. Over time, they worked toward an understanding of what this phenomenon was and why it might be significant, and they made some minimal attempts at regulation. Yet when this perversion was policed in this early period, it was often through regulatory devices aimed at broader problems: poverty, disorder, violence, or crime, for example.
Quite simply, the federal government knew that a “problem” existed, but they did not have words or concepts to sufficiently understand what it was (and therefore how to regulate it). From the turn of the century to the 1930s, regulatory attempts were made, but they were minimal and ineffective because “homosexuality” as we know it (and, in particular, the homosexual-heterosexual binary) was not fully constructed.
As the state expanded, however, it increasingly developed conceptual mastery over what it sought to regulate. This itself was part of the work of state-building, part of a longer process of the state coming to know and care about homosexual. After the Second World War, an increasingly powerful state wrote this new knowledge into federal policy, helping to produce the category of homosexuality through regulation. From the mid-1940s into the late 1960s, the state crafted tools to overtly target homosexuality. In contrast to the earlier period, policies were enacted that explicitly used homosexuality to define who could enter the country and be naturalized, who could serve in the military, and who could collect state benefits [bolding mine]. A homosexual-heterosexual binary, in other words, was being inscribed in federal citizenship policy during these years.
In other words, Canaday argues that as the U.S. state grew and gained conceptual language to identify homosexuals, it also played a central role in creating what we know as homosexual identity, and the homosexual-heterosexual binary.
Regulation, of course, changed what was regulated. The state did not, I argue, simply encounter homosexual citizens, fully formed and waiting to be counted, classified, administered, or disciplined. . . . Rather, the state’s identification of certain sexual behaviors, gender traits, and emotional ties as ground for exclusion (from entering the country, serving in the military, or collecting benefits [bolding mine]) was a catalyst in the formation of homosexual identity. The state, in other words, did not merely implicate but also constituted homosexuality in the construction of a stratified citizenry.
Some have criticized Canaday’s work for focusing solely on the federal government, when so much was happening on the state and local levels. Canaday preemptively addresses this criticism, however, by noting that states and localities “generally policed homosexual acts” (think sodomy laws), whereas the federal government “gradually developed the tools to target homosexual personhood or status, the condition of being a homosexual.” In short, Canaday’s work argues that we cannot disentangle the construction of modern homosexual identity from the growth of the U.S. state and the evolution of American citizenship.
[T]he trajectory of American citizenship in the twentieth century has not been one of continual expansion, but is defined rather by the persistent “nexus of exclusion and inclusion.” As the state moved to enfranchise women and dismantle Jim Crow, it was gradually working to construct a boundary in law and policy that by midcentury explicitly defined the homosexual as the anticitizen. What was an inchoate and vague sort of opposition between citizenship and perversion in the early twentieth century became a hard and clear line by midcentury.
As you might have guessed by my bolding in the quotes above, Canaday focuses her analysis on three major “engines” of the burgeoning U.S. state: the Bureau of Immigration, the military, and the various federal welfare agencies. One of the things that I most appreciate about The Straight State, beyond the good scholarship, is the organization of the book. It is divided into two parts, the first covering that “inchoate and vague” regulation from the turn of the century to the 1930s, and the second covering that “hard and clear” regulation from the 1940s to the 1960s. The two sections are mirror images of each other, with the first three chapters dealing with immigration, the military, and welfare, and the last three chapters dealing with welfare, the military, and immigration—welfare being the “nucleus” of American citizenship in Canaday’s analysis.
The first section of the book, which details the period of time during which the federal government first began to make an attempt at regulating sexual and gender nonconformity, starts with efforts to weed out “degenerates” in the immigration process.
Immigration officials generally did not conceive of homosexual as a discrete identity, but instead lumped together aliens who exhibited gender inversion, had anatomical defects, or engaged in sodomy as degenerates. Degeneracy was a racial and economic construct that explained “the immorality of the poor,” and this helped to give the public charge clause some of its power over sexually deviant aliens.
How’s that for “inchoate and vague”? The sweeping use of the “public charge” clause to prevent “degenerates” from entering the country did not refer explicitly to homosexuality, but rather to the immigrant’s risk of becoming a criminal “public charge.” “Gender inversion” was of particular concern to immigration officials, as they believed gender abnormality was linked to perversion and crime. For example, those with “defective genitalia” (whatever that meant in the minds of immigration officials) and arrested sexual development were targeted under the public charge clause. This vague attempt at regulation, as Canaday notes, was rather ineffective and did not result in many recorded deportations.
Similarly, the military began attempts to police “perversion” long before World War II, starting especially during the First World War.
As the military puzzled, it came to see perversion less as a marker of degeneracy (as immigration officials had) and more as behavior associated with a psychopathic type.
However, in these early years, the military also lacked the apparatus (and conceptual framework) needed to police homosexual status. Instead, the military emphasized that “perversion” was a civilian disease that could infect military units at times and accordingly focused its efforts on court-martialing soldiers accused of sodomy. By the 1920s and 1930s, there were proposals within the military to shift the emphasis from policing acts to discharging “perverts” (and therefore policing status). As Canaday notes, such a shift required “much more sophisticated screening and surveillance mechanisms, as well as a full complement of psychiatrists and military police to implement and maintain them.” Those resources would be made available by the midcentury.
Finally, the first section of the book deals with the distribution of welfare benefits after World War I, focusing especially on the ways in which the New Deal policed “perversion” through its programs—namely, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the lesser known Federal Transient Program (FTP). A few years ago, I wrote an LGBT history diary using this chapter of The Straight State called “Most Fags are Floaters”; here is an excerpt from that diary:
In his first round of New Deal legislation, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the creation of two major relief programs, one you've definitely heard of and the other you probably haven't. The one you've heard of, of course, is the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), started in 1933 as a public work program for young, unemployed, unmarried men from relief families. It was a popular, wildly successful program that contributed much to American parks, buildings, and roadways. This is a familiar story. The other program--the one I'm willing to bet many people haven't heard of (it doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page)--is the Federal Transient Program (FTP), established as a part of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. It served largely the same purpose, but for a different group of beneficiaries: transients (or "floaters"--unattached persons who drifted on the road) of all ages. The FTP was created in the same year as the CCC, but the FTP was killed by 1935, while the CCC remained in effect until 1942. Indeed, the FTP was plagued by low public approval early on, and it did not survive the stigma attached to its program. See, the FTP was perceived from its inception as a hotbed of homosexuality--or "sex perversion"--which is something neither politicians nor the American people took too kindly to supporting with public dollars. Dr. Samuel Kahn, a widely respected psychiatrist, wrote what many Americans at this time thought: "Most fags are floaters”. . . .
Why, then, was the FTP a failure while the CCC thrived? . . .
Transients had long been associated with homosexuality and sex perversion in the early twentieth-century imagination. The idea of the hobo's "wanderlust" and rejection of normal family life in favor of male camaraderie was troubling to many Americans. Add to this the reality that many transients were so desperate for food that they performed sexual favors to obtain it. Hoboes, tramps, and vagrants were widely regarded as perverts. Up until the 1930s, however, transients could largely be ignored without much consequence. But when the Great Depression hit and the transient problem became much more exacerbated and visible, New Deal politicians realized they needed to tackle the issue.
The result was the FTP, which put transients to work for the state. But the program required a massive public relations campaign that stressed the normalcy of the "new" transient. In other words, the transient of the 1930s was a vagrant out of economic necessity, as opposed to the "old," "chronic" transients of the past. FTP officials emphasized the urgency of rescuing the new transient from the danger of being corrupted on the road and turning into a "chronic" problem. The new transient was merely a typical American down on his luck and in the grips of a cruel Depression.
FTP and CCC camps were quite similar, both in terms of the work they did and aid they provided and the homoeroticism often found in the camps. But the CCC survived until the 1940s, while the FTP was shut down in 1935. Why?
Well, the answer is complicated. The FTP catered to young and old transients, feeding the idea that the young were being victimized by the old, perverted hoboes. The CCC, on the other hand, targeted young men specifically. Not only that, but--even more significantly--the CCC built itself as a program that reinforced the family. Although CCC enrollees were unmarried, they were required to list at least one dependent. The FTP, on the other hand, targeted uncommitted, unsettled transients and was therefore seen as a welfare program for sex perverts rather than a training program for young, pioneering men. This is ultimately what caused the downfall of the FTP as opposed to the success of the CCC.
Canaday identifies this episode in New Deal history as a point at which the “murky categories” of the early twentieth century began to come into focus and form into “a sharp homosexual-heterosexual binary.”
The second section of the book picks up after World War II, when explicit regulation of homosexuality became the norm. In this section, Canaday starts with welfare—in particular, the 1944 GI Bill, which she identifies as a major turning point in federal regulation of gender and sexuality.
[The 1944 GI Bill] was major legislation directed at settling men down after wartime. It provided soldiers with home and business loans, employment services, college or vocational training, and unemployment compensation. Yet while extremely generous for some, not all veterans could access the help. In 1945, the Veterans Administration (VA) issued a policy barring GI Bill benefits to any soldier who had been administratively discharged as undesirable “because of homosexual acts or tendencies.” These undesirably discharged soldiers were then the ones most likely to become “drifters” after the war—cut off from federal support for “readjustment,” sometimes unwelcome back home, and holding separation papers that hurt their chances in the labor market.
This was the point, Canaday argues, that the vague categories of the pre-World War II era crystallized into a very clear line between homosexuality and heterosexuality in federal policy. The VA’s regulations constituted both a federal policing of homosexuality as status and a policing of those who did not fit into the heterosexual family model. Canaday calls the GI Bill “a simultaneous expansion and contraction in citizenship.” Following World War II, homosexual exclusion was “built into the very foundation of the welfare state.” In addition:
[T]he explicit demarcation between homosexuality and heterosexuality led . . . to the construction of a closet in federal welfare policy as well. That closet enabled many soldiers to claim benefits because they were undetected. The World War II policy on homosexuality thus provided not only for formal exclusion, in other words, but also for a degraded kind of inclusion in citizenship. And the stakes of being included—on any terms at all—were only made higher by the magnitude of the GI Bill programs.
The last two chapters trace military and immigration policy during and after World War II, when regulation and exclusion of homosexuality became much more explicit and systematized. By this point, lesbians also became targets of a government and military that previously worried mainly about male “perverts”—the construction of homosexuality as a category came to encompass women in addition to men. In immigration, the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 built on military tools to police homosexuality and barred “aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality,” which had the intent and effect of explicitly banning homosexual immigrants. By the midcentury, the U.S. state had not only built the machinery necessary to exclude homosexuals from full citizenship, but it had also helped construct the homosexual-heterosexual binary—and, indeed, homosexual identity itself.
The Straight State ends by considering the twenty-first century and how to undo the “homosexual exclusion and heterosexual privilege [that] have been written into many different elements of federal citizenship policy.”
[T]here isn’t one sweeping act of Congress that can undo what’s been constructed over the better part of a century. Rather, the architecture of exclusion will have to be taken down in the same deliberate way it was put up: piece by piece.
It is an appropriate conclusion to a book published just before Windsor and Obergefell. In the aftermath of these landmark court decisions, marriage equality has been attained. Yet significant hurdles to full LGBT citizenship remain, including the absence of federal civil rights protections in employment, housing, and public accommodations. Our current Justice Department is actively working to ensure that existing civil rights law does not protect gay people. Assuming our so-called president’s tweet edicts translate into actual policy, transgender service members will be rooted out of the military in a manner every bit as cruel and dehumanizing as midcentury targeting of gay and lesbian soldiers. Meanwhile, emboldened state legislatures continue their assault on the basic rights of transgender people. Margot Canaday’s words at the beginning of The Straight State ring true in 2017:
[T]he trajectory of American citizenship . . . has not been one of continual expansion, but is defined rather by the persistent “nexus of exclusion and inclusion.”
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