Books like The straight state by Margot Canaday

The Straight State is the most comprehensive study of federal regulation of homosexuality in American history. Using newly recovered National Archives documents, Margot Canaday shows how the state gradually came to define and penalize homosexuality. The book examines three key arenas of government control—immigration, the military, and welfare—and demonstrates how federal enforcement of sexual norms emerged with the rise of the modern bureaucratic state. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, Canaday traces how the state first encountered evidence of sex and gender nonconformity and began policing it indirectly through the exclusion of “degenerate” immigrants and other regulatory measures aimed at combating poverty, violence, and vice. She argues that the state’s awareness of homosexuality intensified during the later New Deal and postwar periods, when policies explicitly used homosexuality to determine who could enter the country, serve in the military, and collect state benefits. Midcentury repression was not a sudden reaction to newly visible gay subcultures but the culmination of a long process of state building that shaped national citizenship and the meaning of homosexuality in America.

First publish date: 2009