Through oral histories read in tandem with previously untapped archival sources, Margot Canaday's Queer Career unearths an entirely new body of evidence that captures the workplace experiences of a generation of gay and lesbian Americans whose stories have never been told. Canaday does so while making crucial interventions in sociolegal history, the history of gender and sexuality, and the history of capitalism, intertwining those often-siloed genres in innovative and generative ways. My aim here is to highlight just a few of Queer Career's many contributions to the legal history of sex, gender, and sexuality and to the history of social movements and antidiscrimination law.

Despite a number of excellent queer labor histories, the historiography of lesbian, gay, and trans people and the historiography of work and workers have remained relatively uninfluenced by each other. This is puzzling in some obvious ways: the Mattachine Society was founded by a communist, and class questions were right there at the origin of the field of queer history with John D'Emilio, Leslie Feinberg, Joanne Meyerowitz, and George Chauncey. D'Emilio and Feinberg were Marxists and Meyerowitz began as a labor historian, while Chauncey had the legendary historian of work David Montgomery for one of his advisors. Enumerating his graduate cohort in the acknowledgments of Gay New York, Chauncey names a string of Montgomery's advisees, now eminent labor historians, followed on the next page by Edward and Dorothy Thompson, with whom Chauncey spent a postdoctoral year at Rutgers. More substantively, a central analytic move of Gay New York, itself building on and developing D'Emilio's classic intervention, is to understand the urban gay world in much the same way that, say, Herbert Gutman understood the worlds of working-class immigrants (with which gay social worlds overlapped to a great degree): as a “counterpublic,” although Gutman would not have used the term.

It is truly a pleasure and an honor to have my work read by five such esteemed colleagues, and I want to begin by thanking all of them for the thoughtfulness and care of their essays, and also to express my gratitude to Darren Dochuk for organizing this exchange. After working in (pandemic-exacerbated) isolation for so long, it is fascinating for me to see the book through others’ eyes, to appreciate what has resonated, and to grapple with questions and qualms as well.