Margot Canaday embraces two agendas in The Straight State. One is to complicate and refine a standard account of the genesis of the American state's hostility to homosexuality in Cold War cultural anxieties. A second is to show that the political and legal histories of the American state are inextricably infused with the politics and history of sexuality. She succeeds masterfully in both agendas, contributing brilliantly both to understandings of the relationship between state practices and the construction of identity and to the story of the rise of the modern bureaucratic state as a sexual state.

Canaday addresses three different policy areas—immigration, the military, and welfare—in her study, which spans the beginning of the twentieth century to the early Reagan years. She structures her book with two chapters on welfare at the center, sandwiched by two chapters on the military, and begins and ends her empirical analysis with immigration. This structure effectively demonstrates how the national state gradually came to define and refine homosexuality in different spheres and engages in the most sustained analysis in the two central welfare chapters, which describe how the crucial construction of a heterosexual-homosexual binary accompanied America's transformation into a modern welfare state. Her thorough documentary research encompasses formal communications on the part of nascent federal bureaucracies as they made decisions that defined and determined people's administrative fates in these three contexts.

Canaday begins with the nation's efforts to grapple with an overwhelming tide of European immigration at the turn of the nineteenth century and argues that immigration bureaucrats grappled with what they perceived as perverse bodies or sexual practices without having the framework of homosexuality available as a meaningful filter. Between 1900 and 1924, these bureaucrats embraced “perversity” as an inchoate attempt to map sexuality onto more familiar gendered categories. Bureaucrats could then define as problematic “feminist” men who appeared physically or socially to be likely to take on subordinate and dependent roles, running the risk of becoming public charges. These concerns affected only men, however, since female dependence was “considered normal,” and women were more likely to trigger suspicion on the basis of prostitution (p. 26). As Canaday explains, the state had to puzzle through homosexuality before it could exercise its power to define, regulate, and punish it.

The puzzling continued through World War I and the interwar period. Canaday explores the dynamics during these years in the context of the American military's construction of the sex pervert around the practices of homosexual acts. While regulations promulgated as early as 1917 barred the induction of homosexuals, the military bureaucracy gradually shifted its understanding of homosexuality as psychological experts moved from a framework of homosexuality as evolutionary degeneracy to homosexuality as a psychopathic disorder (pp. 63–67). Military officials began to pursue and expel men who had sex with other men, whether their partners were fellow military enlistees or civilians. Yet, Canaday notes, “much of the sex between soldiers that was policed was violent” (p. 84). Her careful review of records demonstrates that military officials knew about the presence of gay men in their ranks, but in the interwar years, this knowledge did not yet lead to action in many cases. Nonetheless, the knowledge they built would ground an abrupt about-face through the rapid implementation of aggressive anti-homosexual policies during World War II (pp. 86–89).

The center two chapters address welfare, exploring how the crisis of the Great Depression contributed to active state theorizing around gender, sexuality, and dependency. Bureaucratic anxieties about transiency overlapped with anxieties about perversity. While the Civilian Conservation Corps's (CCC) camps sought to inculcate drifting teenagers with masculine commitments to becoming breadwinners and heads of household, the sex-segregated environment also facilitated casual homoerotic connections. At the same time, early Depression relief efforts for transient women framed them through the normalcy of dependency; rather than creating camps for these women, government bureaucrats sought to return them to their homes (pp. 126–128). Canaday expands the scope of her analysis in the war years to address the major policy changes incorporated in the GI Bill and practices for administering veterans' benefits. This chapter explores the fascinating phenomenon of “blue discharges,” used to release soldiers from military service without a dishonorable discharge but under a cloud nevertheless. These discharges, given to those separated for suspicion of homosexuality and for resisting segregation among others, rendered the recipients ineligible for benefits from the Veterans' Administration or under the GI Bill. While Congress softened the policy by enabling a path to rehabilitation, the discharges came to be strongly associated with homosexuality, and those soldiers who could not upgrade their discharges found themselves in difficult circumstances as fears of homosexuality increased in the 1950s (pp. 165–68). Canaday arrestingly claims that the structure and administration of the GI Bill effectively created a closet and “institutionalized heterosexuality by channeling resources to men,” undermining the professional workplace progress women had made during the war years (p. 171).

Canaday continues this analysis to consider women in the military between 1947 and 1959. She details how administrative understandings of lesbianism shifted from an almost invisible matter of little concern to a grave danger, warranting rigorous scrutiny and intense suspicion. For the first time, lesbianism became a catalyst for the development and implementation of regulations and policies concerning sexuality, as military officials both worked to define lesbianism as a problem and to stamp it out within the ranks. Canaday concedes that McCarthyism partially coincided with this shift, but notes that the lesbian witch hunts in the military both preceded and continued after McCarthy and that the military's focus on lesbians far exceeded that of other institutions. Nor can this phenomenon be explained by a desire to oust women from military service generally, as military authorities simultaneously purged suspected lesbians while aggressively seeking to recruit more women (pp. 202–205).

By the early 1950s, Canaday argues, the puzzlement of the national state over homosexuality had largely concluded and power came to the center in the form of the McCarran-Walter Act. She describes the act's exclusion of homosexuals as potential immigrants as “the culmination of nearly a century of federal regulation of homosexuality—a consolidation that definitively made homosexual sex … irrefutable evidence of homosexual identity” (p. 216). Ironically, this consolidation took place just as psychiatry was becoming increasingly uncomfortable understanding homosexuality as psychopathology. The basis for bureaucratic policymaking remained law, not psychiatry, however. The state's reliance on legal simplifications grounded the later distinction between act and status as well as the basis of a reform movement in the politics of identity.

In her analysis, Canaday confronts the thoroughly studied phenomenon of American exceptionalism through the lens of sexuality, recognizing that America's unusually negative standpoint toward homosexuality is integrally linked to the exceptional nature of American state development. The argument is double edged, as “the story of the historical production of homosexuality is also … a story about the state's own development” (p. 255). Canaday's greatest contribution is her convincing claim that the production of the homosexual-heterosexual binary was inextricably intertwined with the growth and institutionalization of state capacity in the twentieth century. This twinned development, by Canaday's account, also explains the inscription of heterosexuality in the institutions of the federal state and the federal government's contemporary unwillingness to lead on a path toward greater equality and civic inclusion for LGBT persons. This renders federal change difficult but ultimately necessary. Canaday ends with a powerful argument for political pressure to generate an active federal commitment not just to dismantling the straight state but to promoting inclusion and equality across all policy areas.

Further research could fruitfully explore the developmental history in each of the policy areas Canaday addresses. And while Canaday has chosen the three most significant sites of state building in the twentieth century, more exploration of each site could readily be conducted. For instance, in her consideration of welfare, Canaday addresses neither the mothers' pension program nor the various child-saving agendas of the 1910s and 1920s. Were these also areas in which a nascent bureaucracy puzzled through the regulation of sexuality? Broadening the lens more explicitly to consider children and youths might also help contemporary researchers to understand national-level development of bureaucratic and administrative capacity as a response to intertwined concerns about family and sexuality. And, as in other contexts, researchers could usefully explore the state and local regulatory groundwork that preceded national consideration and action. Canaday's book thus presents a fascinating reframing of a familiar story and opens substantial new space for related research.