Customer Reviews

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

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Though I've never been much of an activist, I consider myself fairly well informed about the challenges faced by gay and lesbian individuals in dealing with federal laws and bureaucracies that have long chosen to ignore us, if not directly put obstacles in our path to equal rights under the law. I believed most of the latter policies were enacted since World War II, and had no idea - until I read this book - that such blatant discrimination was a part of federal policies since the beginning of the 20th Century, at least as regards homosexual males (Lesbians were not a priority, it seems, until around World War II.)

Ms Canaday, an assistant professor of history at Princeton, provides an exceptionally detailed and complete study of federal policies dealing with homosexuality, focusing on three areas: immigration, the military and social benefit programs. The information is provided in a clearly cohesive and logical order, despite the fact that the laws and policies she discusses were neither. The book contains copious footnotes, not just cites but detailed explanations of items mentioned in the main text, making the book accessible to the casual reader as well as for scholarly research. It is shocking to read about some of the longstanding policies of screening immigrants for "homosexual tendencies," and very interesting to read how early attitudes toward gays and lesbians in the military have evolved in the latter half of the century, eventually giving way to the faulted "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy we live with today. The inclusion of social programs in the analysis is important, as the entitlement to such programs was frequently used to justify the exclusion of homosexuals from the military or immigration.

An impressive, important work, valuable to anyone who wants a better understanding about where our fight for equal rights has been, in order to better plot a course from here. Five scholarly stars out of five.

- Bob Lind, Echo Magazine

Distilling an impressive amount of archival research, this book traces the gradual refinement (if that is the appropriate term) of antihomosexual policies on the part of the US federal government over the course of the twentieth century. Three areas are addressed: immigration, the military, and welfare. Not discussed are the baneful effects of state and local governments, as seen in such areas as entrapment and compulsory treatment of perceived mental disorders. In addition, the author offers only a brief discussion of the McCarthyite persecution of federal employees of the 1950s, holding that that has been covered in David K. Johnson's book.

Now in my seventies, I remember the horrendously homophobic atmosphere of mid-century America all too well. To be sure,"the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church"; that is, many of us became activists because we wanted to bring an end to these practices. That said, it is mistaken to suggest, as Canaday does, that the homophobic climate of the era was unique to the US. To be sure, some European countries, such as France and Italy, benefiting from the Code Napoleon, did better. But the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China were worse. Probably, the atmosphere that we endured was a special characteristic of the English-speaking peoples. While England and Wales decriminalized in 1967, over forty Commonwealth countries are still saddled with antisodomy legislation introduced by British colonialism. In countries like Jamaica and Uganda this heritage is accompanied by truly frightening popular outbreaks of bigotry and repression.

Another problem is the residue of the special creationism of the Social Construction trend of the 1990s. "The state . . . did not merely implicate but c o n s t i t u t e d homosexuality . . . (p. 4). This claim is simply untrue to the experience of myself and many others in that period. Prior to becoming acquainted with any theory, we first became imbued with a powerful attraction to a member of the same sex. Some of us thought that we were the only such people in the world. Theory did not "constitute" us.

A possibly revealing mistake, suggesting the limitations of the author's perspective, is the term "puppen-hungen" for a young man who was seeking to emigrate from Berlin in 1909 (p. 19). The actual term is "puppenjunge," a common German-language term for a young hustler at the time.