In her award-winning first book, Margot Canaday insists that historians of homosexuality should bring the state back into their work by paying more attention to the role of federal policies in shaping homosexual identities—and that political historians should recognize the degree to which sexual identity, no less than race or gender, has shaped governmental policies and the boundaries of citizenship. Her searching examination of citizenship and sexuality points to important new directions for work in these fields of study.
The “state”—in the form of vice squads, municipal courts, and liquor boards—has hardly been absent from community histories of urban gay life, but few studies have shared Canaday's singular focus on the national administrative state and none has engaged as extensively with recent theories of citizenship. From the
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Whereas early-twentieth-century immigration officials sometimes tried to keep effeminate men from entering the country, Congress explicitly banned homosexuals (whom it called “sex psychopaths”) from entering in 1952 and authorized the deportation of anyone who had hidden their sexual inclinations at entry. New Deal administrators of camps for unemployed transient adult men sometimes looked the other way when their charges engaged in homosexual behavior; ten years later, the Veterans Administration denied GI Bill benefits to soldiers discharged for homosexuality. The state became more precise and vigorous in its anti-gay policing, Canaday argues, because “an expanding state's steady accretion of tools, knowledge, and experience finally culminated in a decision to act” (p.