Margot Canaday's Queer Career, a landmark contribution to queer labor history, begins at precisely the moment in time when her brilliant first book, The Straight State, left off. The Straight State reconstructed how the liberal regulatory state defined “homosexuals” and excluded them from citizenship between the Progressive Era and the Second World War. Queer Career begins with the Cold War and extends to the present, chronicling the workplace experiences of lesbian, gay, and transgender employees in the United States. Ambitious in scope, meticulously researched, and lucidly written, Queer Career is governed by the central thesis that queer workers at midcentury, as a result of their vulnerability, were “harbingers” of neoliberal capitalism's characteristic employment condition: precarity.
Because Queer Career combines the history of sexuality with the history of capitalism, it will be said to be the heir to John D'Emilio's foundational 1983 essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity.”1 But...
