Sexuality and LGBTQ Rights: The Straight State by Margot Canaday

This week we explored “Sexuality and LGBTQ Rights” by reading The Straight State by Margot Canaday. Canaday examines the role of the federal government in promoting ideas of citizenship and belonging, arguing that when the government expanded during the twentieth century it created new categories such as homosexuality that served to deny many Americans access to full citizenship.

Canaday makes her argument by examining an impressive range of federal and LGBT archives that capture the perspective of the government as well as individuals directly impacted by its policies. I was particularly impressed by the range of sources from the National Archives, which allowed her to examine federal policies on immigration, welfare, and military service across the entire twentieth century (for a copy of my notes, see here). Canaday observes that the federal government rarely took actions to criminalize homosexuality, but instead created tools to identify a new group of Americans who seemed to deviate from society’s expected norms and then deny their participation in the military (and its association with sacrifice and service), ability to claim welfare benefits, and even admittance to the country.

Canaday begins her study in the early twentieth century, an era when the “discovery” of homosexuality was just beginning.  As we learned in previous weeks, during the early twentieth century Americans were very concerned with regulating immigration and the Bureau of Immigration conducted many physical exams of potential immigrants to weed out those deemed undesirable. At this time, officials believed what they termed deviant or perverse behaviors were a result of physical underdevelopment and thought medical exams could identify such individuals. However, by the time of World War I these ideas began to change; while immigration officers wanted to keep individuals out of the country, the military wanted to find ways to keep conscripts eligible for service. The military continued examinations, but began to drift away from ideas of “degeneracy” to explain “deviant” or “perverse” behaviors, and instead relied on psychological exams to advance the theory that there were psychological factors in very specific individuals causing their actions.  The public debated whether the homo-social world of the military might cause such behavior, but military leaders argued that homosexuality was actually the result of interactions with civilian communities; during the era, working-class notions of masculinity allowed men to seek sexual gratification from “effeminate” men, and essentially legitimize such behaviors. As a result, the military did little to punish homosexual behaviors, focusing almost exclusively on cases of rape among enlisted soldiers. Canaday argues court martials were notable primarily because they introduced psychiatrists and sexologists as experts who explained supposed causes of sexual perversions. These first decades of the twentieth century show efforts to categorize and identify homosexuals, but Canaday points out that there is a substantial difference between identifying individuals and using those categories to actively discriminate against them.

By the time of World War II, these relatively lenient approaches began to change. Although many scholars link government homophobia to Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare of the 1950s, Canaday argues that the war years played an equally important role. Within the military, policy changes encouraged the dismissal of soldiers for homosexual desires (rather than the acts identified earlier, which also often went unpunished), seeking out individuals to exclude. During this time, the federal government expanded exponentially to conduct war on a massive scale, and its new agencies and bureaucracies often continued following the war. As veterans returned to the United States, the federal government worked to deny homosexual veterans access to the GI Bill’s robust benefits for cheap loans and credit. Officials at the Veterans’ Administration ignored Congress’s calls to make benefits available to as wide a number of Americans as possible, and instead denied benefits for veterans with “blue” discharges for homosexual behavior.  Although Congressional representatives occasionally tried to help their constituents, their efforts were based around fighting “false” discharges rather than opposing discrimination. As such, the federal government essentially promoted closeting homosexuals – they encouraged these Americans to disappear from public life and thus seem to have done little to serve their country during the war, justifying their exclusion from benefits.

Although most scholars have agreed that men have been the primary focus of the federal government’s efforts to police homosexuality, Canaday also identifies the early Cold War as a moment when policing women’s homosexuality was also extremely important. Immediately following World War II the military actively sought ways to integrate women into its ranks. While debating these new policies, military leaders outlined new guidelines categorizing three classes of homosexuals: violent offenders, consensual participants, and those with homosexual tendencies but few (if any) known actions. The military began seeking to identify women in the third group, focusing on physical behaviors that suggested they were “too masculine” by wearing men’s clothing or combing one’s hair like a man, essentially requiring the military to strictly enforce women’s culture. Military leaders at this time suspected women who remained in the military for a long-term career were likely lesbians since they rejected the idea of conventional gender roles in wider society; categorizing these women as lesbians then became a threat to use against women’s rapid advancement and preserve traditional male hierarchies within the military.

Interestingly, Canaday contrasts the federal government’s use of power and the resulting impact on civil rights for African Americans and gay Americans.  On matters of race, an expanded federal presence helped fight state and local restrictions on Jim Crow segregation, but on matters of sexuality the federal government played the opposite role and actively constrained the rights and citizenship of men and women who defied categories the government created. As a result, Canaday argues that citizenship cannot be understood as simply broadening over time, but instead is the result of ongoing realignment between inclusion and exclusion and repression and toleration. Canaday concludes her book on a relatively positive note, noting that in recent years the federal government has taken steps to support full citizenship for Americans defying traditional heterosexual norms.

While there have been moments of progress in recent years, the Trump Administration seems bent on implementing many policies of exclusion and repression, often directly connected to the three policy areas Canaday examined. Efforts to restrict immigration have a particularly profound impact on the LGBTQ community, as many immigrants leave their home countries because of violent discrimination based on their sexual orientation. In spite of military opposition, Trump attempted to ban transgender soldiers (though recent court rulings suggest this initiative may fail).  The Trump Administration has also worked to oppose civil rights protections for gay and transgender Americans. Ultimately, it seems clear that the Trump Administration seeks policies that define state power by denying full citizenship to anyone who defies categorization around traditional definitions of heterosexuality. As such, these initiatives reinforce Canaday’s point that the expansion of federal power is not inherently progressive and instead the country’s leaders must take care to use their power to benefit all Americans.