Margot Canaday’s Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America is an important, even groundbreaking book for a number of reasons. Primarily, as a history of business and the workplace in the United States, it lifts the curtain on an almost-never-discussed aspect of work culture: the queer employee. How are queer employees different from other employees? What are common career paths? How do they benefit companies? These are vital questions given that, at the moment about 31.7 million people, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ)—9.3% of US adults—and that number grows annually. A population who is close to 10% of the nation’s work force is something to be taken seriously. Queer Career—as a project—is about work, employment boundaries, job opportunity, and security in twentieth-century United States. It is also the story of how LGBTQ Americans, with great imagination, ingenuity, and perseverance, have navigated incredible obstacles and outright legal discrimination—if not pursuing the American dream—attempting to simply maintain a decent life. As such it is an invaluable addition to the literature of queer history.

Canaday’s excellent use of source materials—Department of Labor studies, revenue review, government employment statistics, and interviews with employees—flesh out her business analysis. The study also draws on an extensive LGBTQ archive that includes academic studies, personal interviews with 150 queer workers, oral histories, early 1950s homophile magazines that are never used for this purpose, and now-forgotten 1970 LGBTQ lifestyle manuals that are a treasure trove for historians and the casual reader. Queer Career is a seamless marriage of business and queer history.

Queer Career covers nearly eight decades of US history, making it impossible to cover all of her arguments in a short review. Her primary argument is that the work—across a variety of blue collar, white collar, and professional jobs—of LGBTQ people was directly responsible for creating the post-industrial economy we have today. This occurred despite—and in some cases because of—the precarity, and sometimes overt anti-queer sentiment, that LGBTQ people face in many quarters of the workplace. Structural animus against homosexuals has always existed in American culture—a theme that plays out in multiple ways in Canaday’s analysis—and the most flagrant example of this is what has become known as the Lavender Scare. This was a direct result of post-war panic over homosexuality and President Eisenhower’s 1953 executive order (10450) that named “sexual perversion” as a condition that required removal from the federal service. Between 1947 and 1961, between 5000 and 10,000 federal employees were fired or resigned because of, or in fear of, having their sexuality discovered. This has been covered beautifully in David K. Johnson’s 2004 The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government, and Canaday augments this work with dovetailing this information with an analysis of workplace and labor trends.

While anti-queer discrimination animates much of Canaday’s work two narratives emerge in Queer Career that shape both US workforce history as well as her analysis. The first is her discussion of how LGBTQ workers benefitted employees and thus, because of certain types of jobs, entire industries. Because LGBTQ workers had a higher chance of either not being hired or losing a job if their employer discovered their sexuality that they worked harder, were willing to put up with extra work and longer hours, and were often more loyal. Canaday highlights that this was also true, with variations, for other groups facing work insecurities. Because for much of this time LGBTQ workers did not have dependents—of course some did, but not the majority—were single, or had partners with similar situations they were able to adjust to workplace demands more easily, such as working on holidays or changing schedules. This was particularly true in “secondary-sector jobs” such as the service industry or retail, and even in some “primary-sector jobs” such as corporate offices (p. 12).

Separate from this labor force, but intricately connected to queer work history, was the desire of LGBTQ workers—for both freedom and safety—to find employment in queer industries. This is not a new idea, as early as 1820 the term “counter jumper” was used as disparagement for men in retail shops and connected to effeminacy or homosexuality. Canaday charts “queer work” opportunities from working in gay bars and clubs, in certain “stereotyped” occupations such hair dressers and florists, or simply being self-employed to avoid discrimination. She also examines the growth of queer-owned business ventures that emerged after 1969 with gay liberation such as lesbian presses such as Diana Press or the lesbian-owned Olivia Records (pp. 167–71) and shifts in the medical/healthcare workforce—especially nursing and patient services—that occurred during the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic (pp. 196–205).

Obviously, much of this has changed since the enormous efforts of the gay rights movement have succeeded in securing—despite recent drastic setbacks in transgender rights—workplace anti-discrimination laws and policies. Canaday charts and acknowledges this in the book. Yet, she also recognizes how corporate and labor policies—made mostly with business interests in mind—have also advanced LGBTQ people in the workplaces. In her last chapter “Making the ‘Business Case:’ Gay Rights Inside the Post-Fordist Corporation”—looking at the contemporary business world—she poses the question “Did the corporation co-opt gay rights? Did gay rights co-opt the corporation?” (p. 260). The answer is, of course, complicated. How does social change and social justice happen in a capitalist culture? “What [this] expanded legal protection will actually mean in the context of ever-growing economic precarity remains an open question [but does not deny the reality] that these citizens—long denied fundamental rights—did not refuse ‘the opportunities afforded within neoliberalism’s limits’ in no way diminishes their courage but rather illuminates the ways that civil rights have sometimes moved through market logics, for better or worse” (p. 263).

Canaday’s insights here are often startling and always convincing. Queer Career will challenge assumptions held by many readers in the LGBTQ and business communities but maps out new understandings that illuminate both the past and the future.