Drawing on years of archival research and over 150 oral histories, Margot Canaday’s Queer Career reveals the not-so-hidden world of LGBT work and workers in modern America. In the absence of state protections, she finds, some employers actually appreciated queer workers precisely because they were contingent, unattached, and exploitable. In many ways, that employment relationship augured the way workers would come to be treated in the era of post-Fordism. And it would set the terms for queer peoples’ struggles for recognition and protections on the job in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

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Margot Canaday is an award-winning historian who studies gender and sexuality in modern America. She holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Her first book, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton, 2009), offers a history of how the federal government first encountered homosexuality, decided this was a social problem, and developed policies to regulate it. Her second book, Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America (Princeton, 2023), explores the ways that the workplace has mattered for queer people over time, both as a site of vulnerability and exploitation but sometimes also of deep meaning.