The Straight State

Margot Canday. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America.
Princeton University Press, 2009.

Canady argues that because the American national state was late in developing--specifically, because (unlike Western European states) it formed after the "discovery" of  homosexuality by sexologists in the late nineteenth century (2)--the state itself took a leading role in creating a definition of homosexuality as part of the larger process of defining citizenship and policing the borders of the latter. As she admits in the conclusion, the result is a study which necessarily has little to say about the suffering and injustice suffered by an unknown number of Americans, resident aliens, and immigrants who were--or were suspected of--"homosexuality" as it was (often ill-) defined by various agencies and individual bureaucrats. On the other hand, what this study lacks in terms of the perspective of those who felt the brunt of state power, it makes up for in its nuanced and focused examination of how "the State" was actually personified by the individuals responsible for articulating and interpreting policy and law at the level of implementation.

Canady argues for the slow development of a binary notion of citizenship along the axis of sexuality; by the 1960's, the state had defined people as either heterosexuals or homosexuals, with the latter being unworthy of full citizenship. The development of this binary was a long process--while many historical accounts date the Federal codification of homophobia to the McCarthy era, Canady argues that the Cold War "lavender scare" was rather the culmination of a much longer process dating back to turn-of-the-century attempts to control immigration, then growing with the mobilization of World War I and later the rise of the New Deal State, finally culminating in World War II. The Second World War, unlike the First, lasted long enough so that the inclusion of a significant percentage of the population in the military created an imperative to determine the "fitness" of Americans and their sexual behavior and adherence to gender norms. The mechanisms created to police this would, like the military-industrial complex itself, survive the end of the war, where they would be further refined and institutionalized to meet the ideological aims of the Cold War state.

The hard-and-fast binary nature of Canady's analysis might be a little too pat, but her emphasis on how notions of homosexuality were intertwined with notions of defining citizenship in conjunction with the rise of the state is interesting. Her insight that there was an inversion built in to the liberal state--that the Federal government took the lead in pushing back against state and local laws limiting racial civil rights while simultaneously creating limitations on homosexual rights--is interesting as well.