The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth‐Century America

This slender book packs a real wallop. Everything about it—concept, argument, sources, style, and pertinence to contemporary issues—demonstrates excellence in historical scholarship. No surprise, then, that Margot Canaday’s first book is the recipient of several awards, including the prestigious Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians. Canaday chose three areas of the modern American state (Bureau of Immigration, the military, and federal welfare) to illustrate the tandem relationship between state formation and homosexual identity. Her purpose is twofold. She aims to demonstrate the close connection between the history of sexuality and political and legal history. She also wants to add something new to the history of sexuality by showing that the U.S. government did not embark on a campaign of discrimination against homosexuals because of their “sudden” visibility during World War II. Rather, since the beginning of the twentieth century, as the government consolidated its own bureaucratic power, it recognized and attempted to regulate what Canaday refers to as sex and gender nonconformity, ultimately relegating nonconformists to second-class citizenship. Part I of the book, “Nascent Policing,” covers the pre-World War II years. Through three chapters, one on each of her chosen topics, Canaday explains how the government’s concern over sexual nonconformity was actually folded into attempts to manage larger problems in American society such as poverty and crime. In the first chapter on immigration policies from 1900-1924, Canaday recounts how federal immigration officials were on the lookout for people they labeled prostitutes, pederasts, and sodomites. Although no specific law existed yet to bar them because of sexuality, occasionally these people were prevented from entering the United States and some were even deported, based on the “likely to become a public charge” clause of the immigration law (p. 21). The second chapter focuses on the military in the World War I era. This may seem like an abrupt shift from immigration policies, but Canaday smoothly establishes the connection. Important immigration officials abandoned their positions for work in the military when the United States went to war in 1917, prompting an exchange of information between the two bureaucracies. Chapter three explores welfare during the early New Deal, particularly programs directed at transient men, many of whom were World War