In this episode of Hagley History Hangout Roger Horowitz interviews Margot Canaday about her remarkable book Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America that received the received 2024 Hagley Prize for the best book in business history that year.  

Canaday’s Queer Career’s principal focus is on the private sector, business enterprises large and small, and traces the opportunities, obstacles, and accomplishments of LGBT+ people as they sought to make a living from the 1950s through today. She emphasizes that as federal and many state agencies routinely refused to hire LGBT+ people, their most important sources of employment was in the private sector. Still facing pressures to keep their sexuality hidden in their jobs, their precarity lead them to accept lesser positions and pay than they might otherwise would have qualified for. Once stablished, they nonetheless made great strides in economic opportunity over these decades in white collar and blue collar jobs, and by creating their own firms.  

Her analysis is leavened by the personal stories of the many remarkable men and women who fill the pages of Queer Career. Canaday plants her feet firmly in business history by tracing firms ranging from “movement” enterprises such as Olivia Records and Diana Press that were vehicles for empowerment to large corporations Bell Labs and Lotus, where organizations of LGBT+ employees stepped out of the closet and secured health benefits for domestic partners.  

With sources ranging from over 100 oral histories, to legal proceedings, government records, and materials from private collections, she tells a story that has not been told before, in many areas not even touched.