Queer Career

A masterful history of the LGBT workforce in America
Workplaces have traditionally been viewed as "straight spaces" in which queer people passed. As a result, historians have directed limited attention to the experiences of queer people on the job. Queer Career rectifies this, offering an expansive historical look at sexual minorities in the modern American workforce. Arguing that queer workers were more visible than hidden and, against the backdrop of state aggression, vulnerable to employer exploitation, Margot Canaday positions employment and fear of job loss as central to gay life in postwar America.
Rather than finding that many midcentury employers tried to root out gay employees, Canaday sees an early version of "don't ask / don't tell": in all kinds of work, as long as queer workers were discreet, they were valued for the lower wages they could be paid, their contingency, their perceived lack of familial ties, and the ease with which they could be…