This book is a pathbreaking, riveting historical study of the development of American citizenship in the twentieth century when the inclusion into citizenship of people of color and women was paradoxically associated with the exclusion of lesbians and gay men. Through close study of archival materials, Canaday shows how the exclusion of homosexuals from full or equal citizenship developed historically in three areas of federal regulation—immigration, the military, and welfare—taking a particularly strong and unjustly homophobic form during and after World War II. What Canaday shows with remarkable clarity and force is that it was the growth of federal bureaucracy during this period in the domains of immigration, the military, and welfare that gave rise to the stigmatizing exclusion of lesbians and gay men from citizenship, a federal exclusion that set the stage for the continuing federal hostility to contemporary struggles of homosexuals to achieve recognition of their human and constitutional rights under law in the United States (rights of nondiscrimination, partnership, and marital rights). Canaday's argument highlights and contrasts this federal development to state law, which grew increasingly tolerant during much of this period (a movement of state decriminalization of gay/lesbian sex acts that culminated in the constitutional decriminalization of such acts by the Supreme Court in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas).

Canaday's argument confronts Americans with two intersecting paradoxes. First, there is the paradox of the remarkable gains during this period of people of color and straight women, gains often secured by the activism of social movements that successfully targeted the federal government (for example, Congressional enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965). The paradox arises from the inconsistency of these federal protections of human rights with the federal enforcement of homophobia, the subject of Canaday's historical argument. The second paradox is the inconsistency of the greater state protection of the basic human rights of homosexuals along with the federally enforced homophobia that denigrates homosexuals by not affording them the same basic rights enjoyed by all other Americans.

Canaday's brilliant and incisive historical argument not only reveals these paradoxes for the constitutional incoherences they are but also helps us understand the injustice that sustains them, namely, state enforcement of a rigid gender binary that homosexuals today resist and challenge. What Canaday calls “the straight state” is precisely a federal government that, having expanded constitutional protection to include people of color and straight women, rigidly and unjustly excluded from such protection lesbians and gay men. Canaday brilliantly exposes the sordid psychological motives of this exclusion in her profound and moving discussion of the military's program to enlist more women into military service simultaneously with the extraordinary harshness and intrusiveness of its programs to exclude the many lesbian women who enlisted to serve their country. Under Canaday's probing analysis, we come to see that what underlies such a program of gender integration is precisely the demand that such integration must be on terms that maintain the traditional patriarchal subordination of women. What made lesbian women so threatening to gender integration, as the military understood it, was precisely the ways in which such women resist the gender binary that demands that women always be subordinate to men, whether in private or public life.

It is surely no accident that the twin paradoxes Canaday exposes arose during a period in which American military power, particularly during and after World War II, became more powerful and more important in American and world politics than it had ever been. It is also a period in which at least two American military adventures abroad—in Vietnam and Iraq—have been widely and not unreasonably condemned as unjust forms of imperialism unworthy of a democratic republic. We may thus link Canaday's argument about the role the federal government has played in enforcing the unjust subordination of lesbians and gay men (including legitimating the closet as a way of escaping or mitigating such injustices) to a broader concern of interest to all Americans, namely, the ways in which uncritical long-standing patterns of patriarchy corrupt democracy both at home and abroad. There is a personal and political psychology at work here, a traditional patriarchal psychology, that is inconsistent with democracy. The psychological fragility of this psychology is shown by the ways in which insults to one's honor (irrespective of whether there is any real or credible threat) elicit violence, a violence often unjust both in its ends and means. State enforcement of the gender binary perversely supports a psychology that threatens all democratic peoples. This brilliant book is revelatory.