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aids era. the following decade. and we have, for obvious reasons, focused on the staggering loss of life during this era. but the jobs came first and deserves consideration. firings occurred. corporate offices, law firms schools and hospitals. but also reached deep into the queer work where gays had long accepted ill low status jobs in forety waiters, retail clerks and florists, service occupations associated with gay men all lost positions either had aids or were perceivedit. lesbians to lost jobs at higher rates. well, in what thecutive

director of the national gay task force described as a consistent pattern of transfer ins from fear of aids to fear of gay men and it's the context of this period of extremeemployees in the corporate sector began to organize and to their companies to ask for protection recognition. this is an interesting moment for gays when what had long been a very sharp ti professional and being identifiedpolitical began to erode, d campaign inside the corporate sector unfolare things i go into in great detail in book, but whgermane to our roundtable today is is simply thait soon stood in marked contrast to an anemic gn for meaningful employment protection from the state. the corpor persuadable on such that the most m employment rights by the end of the 20th century came not through

through the market. and what this most movements then achieved, while extremely urse only patchwork protection. extended corporate and white collar, but not in manufacturing or, other kinds of blue collar and serviceso it left much of the working class as vulnerable as ever. and the result was that by the end of the 20th century, middle class and wealthy gay people were far more likely to be visible on the job than. poor and working class queers were. and this was a striking reversal, too, to circle back from where i started from the mid-twentieth century, when queer people were far more likely to be visible in working class occupations than those in most professional settings dared to be. and the shift over time in socioeconomic position of the queer people who we can see has a lot to with the contemporary myth of gay affluence the apparent privilege of the more portion of the community was

years used very effectively to undermine undermine the enactment of anti-discrimination laws that the less visible poor and working class community really needed. now, if of that sounds ratr and the extent that the opening of the workplace to bt people occurred in the last half cewaa rather partial opening. it is bleak. i do just want to end my my remarks on a slightly different note for if the queer history of the workplace has always been about exploitation, about statusut vulnerability, it has almost always almost always been about meaning as well. and often the vulnerabili intertwined. i collected so many aneotes in researching my book that are about that precise relationship, so i just want to end by sharing a couple of those. they're very, very comment today has tried to position, workinclass and class jobs in some kind of

relation to one another, i'll that here with one anecdote that reflects working class experience and another drawn from a professional work milieu. and the first is from a short personal narrative that's in a sbian herstory archives. and in this narrative, the author t at berwick, berwick in pennsylvania in the late 1970s. job, there were 12 women working in men, all 12 were lesbians and we had what had happened to other -- that tried to tak of women banded together, developingategies to prevent rape and harassment. they went to the foreman and be assigned to a crew that was not in eyesight of at least two women. placed on separate crews, but within crawling women were harassed by foremen, they went as a gro to the foreman's office to ask if their wives also to the green door motel.

they responded to feeling threatened by adopting a violent posture themselves such that they did as little paperwork and as much cornering as possible our anger and our unity to get what we deserved. instead of feeling isolated or defeated the experience at the forge was a powerful one. since we left the forge, this womante, i've never lost the feeling that i got there of being able to and forcefully any situation that i havand then the second short anecdote is from my own oral y with a woman lawyer who was talking, being at the inauguralng of the nation's first gay bar association. gay lawyers that first conference was amazingly well attended. it was one of those things like build it and they will it was exciting in the sense of eyes. it was exciting because if you grew up like many of us did, to be in a room of 100 gay lawyers, it was didn't have to do anything. they just had to stand.

and part of it was the prejudice that you grew up with in your own mind that you couldn't become anything. so great meeting and, great vulnerability, intertwined in both of those accounts. and i'll leave it there. thanks. d8all right. sorry, i'm on too many microphones here. yeah. so i just want to thank everyone for being on this and all of you for coming to talk about unions on saturday morning. i feel like this is part of the new wave of activism. my talk is called trade unionism. this queer practice in the wake of the pandemic, we have seen a pronouncedlabor activism. people have put their bodies and queer people can come together, dan kings and queens who sometimes read s get the medical care we deserve and so parents love their children for who they are. during that same moment, the

labor movement seems, after decades of decline, to be back from the university ofcalifornia at starbucks, from hollywood to own workplace, where i am the professor ers. people are organizing and collectively forming unions to stop their jobs from making them tired depressed, sick, bored sad and poor. i want speculate about why these things are happening at the same time. to answer this, i think we need to begin by imagining labor activism itself as queer labor discipline and hetero normative ity rely on similar cultural apparatuses is a similar set of values to make themselves coherent.tional german sociologist max barber described those values as the protestant ethic that in which people live to work rather than work to live. central the protestant ethic are a particular cultural traits personal responsibility, deferred gratification sexual self-respect, restraint, just and thrift, just to name a require one to ignore their desire for bodily

pleasure in order to channel bodily for their employer. if we imagine workplace activism as being about redirecting our bodies away from what companies want and toward what peoplewe open a space for us to engage age, to embrace, anddulge our desire for love of beauty, pleasureg that is what many would define as a queerts the foundations of heteronormative city. and that might make my to make the world more joyous and, maybe even more sexy. maybe that rejection of bodily discipline helps explain why all at once. we are seeing a queer labor upsurge. iout trade union ism as queer or when i was working and started working on my new book, teamsters metropolis, which helps explain why during last upsurge in the 1950s. historians often described two distinct sexual geographies that defined mid-twentieth century u.s. eighties.

we rightly argue acts of public sexual dissent often take place in one's sexual geography. one in the old neighborhoods of the ce city where people on the margin because of their performance claimed space in a hostile formation was the dominant sexual geography of the era, a suburban landscape by the single family home state, enforced racial segregation and heterosexual domesticity. labor movement was the handmaiden for the second of these two geographies, both because unions were staunch advocates for the family wage, which gav breadwinner and the dependent wife. and because labor history is a field has so often over centered the stories of conservative white, workers. today i can this purported alignment between the labor movement and heteronormativity and argue that an unruly and often underground trade practice helped produce the dissident. of the 1950s. and movement more

powerful than it ever had been,lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender liberation movement. well, this unruly unionism was uncommon in the cio shops at large corporations and heavy industry. it was ubiquitous in both independent afl and in teamsters locals in the service sector. defining this unionism were t just the teamsters. loud voices, swinging fists that historians sometimes fetishize. but the flamboyant clothes was homes, cars, the rich food, the late night drinking and dancing the extralegal organizing tactics and a sometimes bold unwillingness to be contained within the rigid boundaries of monogamy domesticity ity gender, normativitheterosexual ality. let tell you about one person just to save time. here to show you what i what i mean. the i'm going to talk about is a middle aged jewish named beatrice riker. glance, one might have described riker as an activist. the

late 1940s, a single woman, riker lived in a small but sunny apartment not far from the original yankee stadium in the concourse neighborhood of the bronx. like many other activists in the labor movement at the peak of its financial stability, riker made a living through a joas a union staff member, working as the secretary treasurer of amusement and retail clerks employeesnk local 1115 c the locals always have complicated mes. while historical evidence shows that beatrice riker clearly cause the day to day details of her affairs diverge sharply from conventional style unionism. stems from local 1115 sees involve men in shadowy spaces on the margins of york's service economy. the so-called grindhouse movie theaters that attracted large audience with content that flagrantly violated mid-twentieth century norms race among the highestwhile riker worked for

local 1115 c wasply made one hour and eight minute film that was released in 1953. from theowul director ed wood. the film's main character appears to be a young white man named glenn, who lives in a fo bungalow. viewers soon learn however nngritty central city fashion district, where she makeup, lingerie and women's and where she to express a personhood, the contemporary audience would describe trans feminine. glenda story enables documentary style interviews of purported scientists, doctors and police about genderonconformity. given the popularity of film and the absence of mainstream queer topics. we could guess that it drew a wide variety viewers. some people may have used glenn or glenda as a source own transgender experience or those of their friends and loved ones. others could have watched it too fashioned themselves as a dissidentsociety that repressed queer culture so others could have got scorning

the queer narrative as a freak show. or they coul some sweet treats and watched glenn or gnda. doing, but it was those sweet tre and not glenda as gender expression that put beatrice ryker oe cover of new york's newspapers in the early fifties to. keep cost to minimum grind. house owners outsource the candy repreneurs to set up concession stands in the grindhousein 1947, jacobs sarnoff became one of those entrepreneurs. bernoff had times to left he buckwalter in the 1930s, the member of the murder inc underworld hit squad and had served prison time for extorting millions of dollars from milk delivery companies during the c+eat. sometime after bernhardt's parole, it appears that he invested in a company called abc vending, which was in the process of taking over small disparate and undercapitalized concession stands in the grind houses and connecting them into a single umbrella organization.

but because scores of different companies were selling candy garets dots and charleston chews at the those were the most popular candies of 1953. i learned. constantly to being undercut by new companies costs. to neutralize that threat, bernoff turned to beatrice riker's, the union. bernoff and riker's signed up. everyone who did business with abc vending to be members of local 15 c both rank file workers who hock candy in the grindhouse aisles and the entrepreneur who actually own the concession stands that became part of the abc vending umbrella since union contracts included job security provisions, they made it more expensive, legally onerous and for a grindhouse owner to change conce extra layer of protection for burn offs. businesses. beatrice riker physically ran this cartel, visiting every grindhouse every week to verify that all concessions. staff and managers were union members and collecting

commission payments from the stands that wo vending. riker reapedial benefits from this system. not only did she collect a payc but also appears to have been jerkoff jacob bernhardt's hidden partner in abc vending itself, a stockholder who entitled to a cut of the fees she obtained from workers each week. n understand riker as a union activist or as a think it appears that she was both. law enforcement understood her that the payments she gathered each week for fromextortion money that was forcibly extracted concessions workers for nothing in return. on april 26, 1951, the new york times announced that beatrice riker had been indicted for orchestrating what the new york city police department called the candy kickback racket. what i want you to see in this story is that beatrice riker was an unruly person and that union activism is the means by which she expressed that

' ure was the mechanism for bodilysxsexual regulation. though this regime of control ca than century working class regimes suburban ionization nevertheless strictly contain body' desires. suburban culture, for example for sexual pleasurcontained it within monogamy domesticity and the single family home. suburban allowed for the indulgence of conspicuous consumption, but contained joy of that indulgence by making it a reward. disciplined labor.that containment came with strict limitations on workers horizons. state sponsored racial segregation, compulsory heterosexuality, and a deep cultural derision of the unrestrained had defined life in the immigrant industrial metropolis in which beatrice riker had come of age. beatrice riker refused all of these demands with trade unionism.

she was a single woman lived alone in her own apartment in the central city and had a ss life and was often by herself in paces that we might just call queer today. her dealings in the candy kickback racket were unorthodox probably illegal exploited some frontline workers, even as they protected immigrant small business owners. tidy, thougher story is most certainly not her connection to organizedice riker to express a sexual and far beyond the boundary of heteronormativity. gender normativity and domesticity. i thus think that riker has something to teach us today. we are at a moment when many people especially young people are refusing to let others decide how they look, sound and dress, how theconfigure their bodies, how they spend their time and they expr sexual. transphobic and anti-immigrant

politicians make those decisions. many people, in many cases. but for the vast majority of peop such control of their body. theirire and their future. beatrice riker used her union to resi that control. i propose that as they build unions at tesla, trader joe's, delta, and certainly and many college and universities across world queer, people are doing that exact same thing, making a single adaptation to stand in the way of labor and sexual control. again for organizing this panel for b this is very exciting. i'm going to start wi a anecdote. so emily baker was hired by the producers association, the npr in minneapolis, minnesota in 1954.

by 69, the 55 year old had worked for the tcm for 15 years. en promoted to a supervisory role and was reportedly described doing an exceptional job organizing office. what? however, was that had recently been diagnosed as awhile in may 1969, baker took a medical leavof absence to surgically transition from male to female at the university of mi recover at home extended leaves of benefits offered to of the mpi. workers were given f salaries the first two months of their medical lea salary for subsequent as a long time employee who had reportedly never missed a day of work. baker believed that the taxpayer would care for her throughout her convalescence about two months into her absence, however apparently apart of the administrative process transferring baker from her full salary to disability pay

the taxpayer requested additional documentation from baker's company. baker had undergone surgical gender affirmation. company officials scrambled to dismiss her. four days later, on july 18th, 1969 tcpalm management issued a baker on the grounds that she had, quote, voluntary early absented herself from work without adequate notice to supervisors. unemployed baker was forced to relocate to salt city job. now, up until this point baker while unjust, is unfortunately far from unique. mid-century advances in u.s. sexology had offered some gender crossers like baker an increased level of medical and identity affirmation. but these individuals, if outed ha choice to relocate and start life again somewhere else.workplaces were especially precarious spaces. as my esteemedo have argued out, gay federal workers who

were subjected to cold war anti-gay propaganda and mass dismissals. what has been become known as the lavender and the private sector was not necessary. we much better right. openly or outed gay and trans workers were particularly vulnerable to exploitation or harassment by unscrewing useless employers. given long history of precarity fore trans people, it's unsurprising that baker might be immediately fired after was outed at work, or that she would respond by relocating to a city over a thousand miles away. what is surprising is what happens next. so from her new home iner filed a claim with. the minnesota department of human rights, the mdh, are charging the taxpayer with sex just been added to the list of protective categories in the minnesota human act that very year. in 1969, and baker's of this new category s this law applied to both cis and translained to

reporters on november 26, 1969, quote, it's a classic case. she was obviously qualified to perform the and in fact, baker was replaced by a man atunfortunately after nine months of investigation mdh are investigating later alvin mcfarland agreed that the team provided sex and legal workplace protections. that's not the part. the that's a good thing is unfortunate is that his supervisor did not agree. and on june 2nd, 1970, mdh commissioner stopes closed baker's case based on a unilateralist that quote, change of sex is not sex within the meaning of the minnesota state act agai discrimination. baker was one of the first of used sex and disability based anti-trans discrimination in statefederal agencies between 1969 and 1992. my dissertation centered the

stories of these workers and in doing so it approaches the topic of queer work in a in a way that of differs from my esteemed co panelists rather than focusing on the experience is of queer people at work or the professions that were shaped by queer workers. my work focuses on people who like baker were fired or enced workplace harassment almost immediately after their employers learned that they were trans, either because they themselves came to their employers hoping to get a change of name on their company records, or because they were outed to their employers. other people, people outside of their control. in particular, focus is on what relative of those workers did after were fired, which is to use new employment protective legislation to fight to preserve thhts at work. so a major question that i'm asking then is what do employment laws do for working people? like hate crime legislation utility for queer people has is hotly contested right now employment law is a mixed bag. on one hand, anti employment

discrimination laws fundamentally alter the social and legal landscworkers. before these laws were enacted both welfai the unwritten rule blamed workplace mistreatment on workers visibility non-product or misbehavi it's your fault you were fired because you didn't live up to these standas. but these laws and and in particular, i'm talking aboutights act of 1964, the rehabilitate act of 1972, and then comparable state legislation that's passed after the fact that these laws revoke is blame on employers, illegal and discriminatory actions. s not your fault as a worker. it's our as your boss for doing something wrong in part because these laws were preceded by highly publicized collective activism, which helped to spread the rhetoric of workers rights across the country. some workers came to expect that theird be protected regardless of their race religion ability. in some, like employment law got even more specific protecting workers from discrimination based on sexual orientation.

and while that was very for gay workers, some trans workers were to use that to their advantage as well. so to people who didn't ma my dissertation because they weren't actually fired were. smithsonian curator susan cannon and bonnie davenport, both of whom relied on 1970s era d.c. law to protect their right to work while and to transition on the both of these both of these womeneir jobs after employment. bonnie davenport on to have a storied career. she's initially with a gay police who's also protected by the law. but then like, youor another like 20 years even so anti-discrimination legislation. oh, no, i'm sorry, but most employme law at the time was based on a broader legal like sex or disability that could not as easily or automatically be applied to trans workers employers in

required convincing from a third of autagencies before they would concede that trans workers were protecte by. these laws. even so, anti-discrimination legislation offered workers a path to challenge workplace mistreatment that they could take as individuals without needing to be connected to a wider network. and this was particularly salient for diagnosed transsexual workers whose small numbers geographic isolation and assimilationist, often to form or join larger scale collaborative acvist networks rather than having to uproot their lives moved to a new part of the country and leave their jobs as the unwritten rule had mandated diagnosed transsexuals could mobilize anti discrimination legislation after 1964 to fight to retain their jobs and to keep their lives unchanged. and although they're bringing these suits individually, their casesntial to effectuate broad structural change that could protect rexual workers across the state or country. let's. but legal action was not an

automat guarantee ofand nor was it available to the vast majority of workers. almo all of the employment claims i studied were brought by people who had been medically diagnosed as transsexual. so this meant that they had been subjected to an intense process magical screening that historically imposed colonial, racial and classes bottleneck on medical transition effectively limiting surgical intervention to only the most of true transsexuals. a second bottleneck imposed upon this mostly white, gender normative heterexual transsexuals was that very few had the legal literacy fi or support necessary to itial date a legal dispute. of those who did the f filing civil litigation in state or federal courts, and of remaint potentially many years of appeals imposed a further classconstraint on aggrieved workers, limiting the numr of legal claimants to those who had the financial to hire attorneys pay fees or ultimately, while transsexuals of all classes would have

benefited from employment laws, only those transsexuals were material a strong familial support could survive the years longexpensive court battles to successfully force their employers to award themfinancial compensation. and none of these workers actually got their jobs back. a feon compensation. that was about it. that was about it. then transsexual efforts at advancing transsexual rights through the legal system were further hampered. hampered by the waning liberal momentum through the 19 through the 1970s and 1980s, lawmakers increased red trans workers cases through conrva tive ones that opposed broad civil rights protections and, favored emoyers anti-family ism and hobo phobia, even oppose legislating from the bench. their trans exclusionary decisions retroactively modified congressional language, reinforced accent social stratification and to make the la restrictive than it was when initially written in the absence of a extralegal

social activist, which i argue was the on effective way to resist the increasingly conservative agenda agencies and legislatures. the vast majority of claims brought by transsexual workers failed so. returning to the question i asked earlier, what does employment law do for trans workers? ultimately although anti-discrimination law seems to s with a viable method, they as individuals could use to challenge discriminatory employment practices, the structure of the legal system winnowed out. but the most respectable into transphobic ruled individual transsexual g workers. not only did these legal venues not offer a genuine to the unwritten rule, but they also firmly upheld the cis and e status quo. that being said, you know what? cases dortant impact prompting state and reshape the definitions of sex and disability for all workers and

helping to set the]. legal precedent that courts and agencies needed to exclude other marginalized workers, including cis sexual gay from protection from under sex and disability civil rights legislation. now, this isn't to say that the law is useless, right? 2020 bostock rg ulinsh impactful legal legislation is sort of worth noting that it's not perfect and it's not accessible to the vast majority of people. thank you. terrific. so, wow, our panel has left us with a rich our discussion. at we're going to do for our roundtable discuss going forward is we're goingo have the discussion based off questions or comments from you all and. i would like to encourage each

your discussion of the audience questions to also know, you react or talk about what you've heard from frr youso we can have a little cross discussion g on. so let's see. what we'o get couple maybe going questions or comments and we are going to use this mike, which i'm going to bring out. so who who has something that they would like to raise with our group? so i turn this on. is it on? i it check it. yes, it. was that watching something. okay. i got. this report. we hear it. it's sorry. yeah. yes. so i'm mark stein and it's exciting, i have to say. it really.

i think, as you suggested suggests a real history, a graphic moment with so much rich workreat work being done on queer labor history. and i guess margo, what is i think it's really fair to call for its lack of emphasis on labor historover the last couple of decades. but i guess i see more work than signaled not the of national syntheti approach that you took, but whether peter berg on the pacific northwest, aaron leclair and alan berube, you're panelist and another you know, other work on flight attendaspecifically me and miriam frank. so so it seems to me, you know we're definitely something different is happening right now. but but put together there is actually i would argue, as i said, a significant amount of work that's been i'm about your response to that. the other thing icharacterization of the

seventies, and maybe this is betage point in in san francisco, but west coast gay liberationy started right as as you probably know, with a months long demonstration against the firing of gail whittington by a steamship company. and there followed demonstrations against employment discriminate in a tower records pacific telephone. so there's that sector there's all the professional began passing resolutions against anti-gay discrimination in the seventies there's all the anti there's allheyment discrimination laws starting with east lansing in ann that focus primarily on employment. and then itat afl-cio late seventies passes and i've learned from work i'm doing that it buildsearlier resolutions passed the california federation of labor and the american federation sorry, california federation of teachersnd the and the american federation of teachers. so, so put togetr. i guess i see a lot of lgbt

movement, labor activism on these issues. in the seventies.correctly, you don't see that work as either nationall significant or or or significant in general and i'm curious about your thoughts about that. sure. i'm thanks. thanks mark. i think i don't disagree you that there was a lot going on with, this sort of intersection of gay liberation and thinking about workplace protection. i just don't think and i think it's important in terms of a kind of social movement i don't think it ended up being otective people at work in the sense that most of that, you know, sort of like the local ordinances that were passed like the first one that is, i think east. and again, they're all coming out of kind liberation or many of them come at a local gay liberation chapters and that tend to be in university towns. capasses passed. but i think you know, it's

significant in terms of again, the social movement in a kind of symbolic politics. but do people actually use those ordinances? they don't. there's there are very few enforcement mechanisms with those ordinances, and they're the way in which they're able to be passed in many inst that they have to be moved through very, very d people don't often don't even know about them. and that's true even in san that that they're the sort of local activists were frustrated there that people didn't seem to to know and. there's another really interesting phenomenon in this period that i think even where pe their in particular municipality they willing to utilize them because it means coming out and makinglnsomewhere and so people sort of decide wtever i t of pursuing a claim under this ordinance is not is actually going to make me less safe. so i think i mean i agree there is this sort of there is definitely a kind of upsurgeof some

some level of of activism aroe workplace. but i don't i don't think it actually and i feel that way about state employment laws to maybe with the exception of thet people with hiv and aids are able to use this state disability laws eventually. but i think to the extent against stat laws, i think don't end up being protective in the same way that federal civil righso that's kind of how i see that period. and i also think there is, to the extent that know the sort of the social movement upsurge, you know, there's a backlash employers are really going after people in the seventies and firing people in the seventies and looking people inployment in that period in a way that they would not have in the fifties and and so i think it's just it's a complicated miure of of, again, both the kind of change in consciousness. changing sort of rights consciousnesson the job.

and then, you know the first point, i don't i don't disagree with you i mean, i do think e work in the pipeline is amazing, as this panelreally excited about all of these papers most the work is about working class se about people actually did no but that i think i stand by that but i certai agree that there is a there is a we're building ont exists and particularly, you know, alan brubeck, you know, really the coming out under fire a labor history too. i don't think often read that way. but it was, i think, a labor course, his amazing work on ring cooks and stewards never really surfaced as a book because of his untimely death, but and miriam frank's work as well. reallytant. so thanks. do have any other comments from panel on to. okay terrific.

yes. i think thank you all so much this was remarked. and my name is faith scherer at uc davis. my question is sort of like coming from something you said margo, about bars being a source potential upward mobility and division and people being interested in and night and so thinking that i a question for any of you and thinking about your working class subjects. if you haveeen subjects who were two different and. if the way that they relatedtheir identity and their sexuality and their workplace ried in those two different workplaces. do you mean working class and in middle class workplaces. is it not necessarily like not

necessarily working class and middle class workplaces? it could be two different working class workplaces. like if someone had like two jobs or something. i'm happy to speak a little bit to that. if other are okay with that. yeah, that's a really great question. one thing that i read about which i think that is this is something that like a point i think i'll be able to make the dissertation when i have more space. 10 minutes, you know, i think like a lot of the trends it are nonconforming subjects i write about like i work in the underground economy, whether that' sex whether that's like involving various like druec them have jobs in formal ihink like there is, i think like prevailing historiographical kind of notion. and there's like that like, you know, i think like trends in gender nonconforming have like a kind of universal shared kind of like economic vulnerability as well as like a shared a universal like experience under a racial capitalism. myes that presumption.

but one g that, yes, i found all the time, which i was i was sort of really sort of i think a lot of ways is by still sort of working through is like a lot of yeah, like trans sex workers in like the sixties and sev this was something that it's speaking that kind of temporal division like you could do at night and then you had your like day job. it's not universal. manyple like some people, it was their only job. but that is like a story i keep hearing over and over think, you know stuff i've been thinking about too is that in a lot of kind of my subjects as well, i'm i think this is particularly case for transvestite communities where cross-gender living is something that only sort happens in like the private of like the home or in these likee these like where people, you know, be able to kind of dress up. but a lot of times like folks would like be completely like closeted essentially w to work often as like they're

like i think the gender this sort of like gender, they were assigned at birth. i think that there's a lot of really interesting of reasons for that. and these you know, one way this is kind of a way of kind of you, i think, like a way of honestly, in some instances protecting like a degree of like economic privilege andower. but i think that yeah, absolutely. there is many of my subjects of many, you kn forms of employment at once. and i would just say in, in my own research i the thing i've sehaving. two different kinds of jobs at the same time. maybe people in higher status jobs deciding to hit pause and. take a break to go, say, work as temp or. sometimes, you know, go work. and in what i would call the queer work world to just sort of, you know, the the, you know, one of the informants has i wasalways looking for those low paying jobs where i could be some people are

always in in i mean, we think about people of being relegated to that world. but there were people who actually chose that. and i think there are people who would in that world for a while and then go back a kind of professional track, but then take a break and go be in the queer work world and job particularly at mid-century, which were very easy to come by, move in and out of people, i ink, you know, are sort of navigating work in that way and different kinds of jobs for precisely the reason that it gives them a space to openly queer and for a while. yeah, something i guess one thing i'm thinking about just the overall literature on work in general is just smaller. so answering a question like you're asking is sort of hard because i think labor history shrunk so much as a like coming through grad and the odds i sort of thought of myself as a

semi closeted labor historian. i had to i had to pass as like historian of sexuality to get ajob and then have this little trick up my sleeve that once i o to. and what i think that's done and there are very obviouslyicated reason intellectual, historical reasons for that. but i think wh we ended up with is just a smaller body of study of work like your work. and so emily baker worked in the twin cities and milk producer association, notorious a corrupt and corrupt a ball working with small afloat goals that were a people. and so when you started talking, i was like, i early fifties and what drew her to then a made her stage watershed like labor rights case like was the milk prod association, a place where she could embody a self that wasn't the same self as was required in minneapolis the mid so i just think that there's so much workt needs to be done because of the temporary sort of recession of labor history.

fascinating that so many high, high tech ron drexel university. i'm interested in see any expressions of like, you ow employment discrimination we need more queer bosses. i, i think we need more clear we need more queer capitalists. and i say this because own work is interested in how black physicians and entrepreneurs looked at the crisis. there's a crisis of organized labor that organizes queer and people of color, queer trans people of color at the margins of organized labor. and then you have the way that employment is private sector and that also relegate right queer trans and people of labor and so a lot of my. my subjects in the 9060s were like we're going to use the government money through antipoverty that's to that gives us the money to be able to do this thing called black capitalism. and i'm interested to see whether or not you had any that like your folks that you look at

are like t solution in this capitalist economy. is in order to get oarms spaces within organized is organized right ideologica private workspace, they're like, well, just need to be a queer boss, right? yeah. not that i'm advocating for thabecause i'm interested in like the right, right, right. so that. yeah, yeah, t. a have a critique of black capitalism and this kind of kind of sexual pita advocated that potential. but i'm interested like do any of the folks that you look at and are you going to go, oh my gosh, i question. the short think is we've sort of settings is yes like and for me, i think this doesn't come out as much in this paper, but it's something it's going to come out in the chapter dissertation is that, you know again there's a sort of image, i think, in lot of like chris drew about like the sort of universallyvulnerable subject, but then is universalized and what i've found is like that's not true. like or that is true for like

certain folks like transgender g folks are like participating at all levels in the machinery ofu know, i think that that like kind of what my paper i think was trying to do a nascent like class conflicts that we can who like, you know, like, like the hotels, many of whom are and gender nonconforming. i'm summer, going to be doing research the francine non-gender collection she really really excited to do that. she was a white trans woman entrepreneur, a business owner. she owned like seven i've rumors that, like, she might have been a landlord. well like, i'm still. i'm still trying to figure out but, like, you know, she's someone and i and i see arguments about, like about like qisort of idea of, like we, you know, it's sort of in the dark in this sort of more, again, like earlier boxing program. initiative. interestingly, where there's this sort of sense of know, let's get let's let's let's make secretaries but it's interesting, at least in like the nineties, you see for like business owners and and

especially also ieally interestingly, i think really it's like kind of work withinndustry, in the military industrial complex and these reallythat i think really need historicism. and i'm still i'll tell you more about it in five years. but yeah i would say it's that's a great question and your points out there. great question. i think i would just add, you know, the like politesse and the managing had employment services and they were in the fifties and sixties trying to entice gay people who companies to hire people this of course unsurprisingly had limited successause gay people who had you know, we're in a position to hirehat that would make them vulnerable in some settings. and i think you see that with people who owned businesses and then just people who were placed in corporate structures and whatever. and there's just a common refrain, you know, sort of

bending over backwards not to have somebody who would be identifiably queer for you so interesting story. yeah, i i think we kind of need a better theory of the boss in ways we over represent large in the study of work. and so it's like what is queer boxing like it, you know princeton university, general motors. but actually in marginal communities, communities often people are the boss, like a -- little bike four employees right? and so who does a lot of the bossing in the states? and i think that there is a lot more ambiguity in those spaces that we don't represent enough because those firms don't seem like they matter. goodness. we if we write about things, we must write about princeton in general motors. but actually, that might be cutting off a lot of interesting ways of thinking about the intersections of race, sex, all these things. i wanted to i wanted to ask

about the relationship between sexuality and gender and the differentor, the different ways of thinking about queer in quotes, queer and trans labor ounds from hearing the amazing stories you've ways in which there's a lot of overlap between subjects the basis of sexuality and those marginalized on the basis of a gender transition in somes wch there's not. and ryan, your your framework sort of emphasizing bodily discipline and unrestrained bodies can be a really interesting way of linking them. but i could that in some of your accounts there also might be some justification splitting off b or histories of sexuality, trans histories of hear your thoughts on how gender and sexuality you work or don't work as analytic categories together and thinking about the history of labor. hmm. mm hmm. i woul you for some work. oh, that's a fantasti question, which i can talk a little bit about. it's something that ink lot as someone who was i in a lot of ways, like

tr now to doing like trans studies. i think that from my perspective, i think like sexuality and gender sort of learning a lot of wayndamentally like a mesh sort of difficult to separate. and i think that like you know i think that like within trans studies there's a lot of very complicated feelings about like queer studies in queer theory i'm for understandable reasons and i think i tend to i think there's a lot from like career studies in queer theory that i, which i like tried, which i think like from my perspective that i think one way that i think i can kind of see these two analytic categories. like for one, i would say that like one way is i can kind of see these analytic categories contention sort of working in concert with eachhe role of like sexuality in terms of like work that gender nonconforming folks can do. becausenstantly keep seeing in the archives is a lot of folks trying to like distance sort of, i think in particular

transsexual womanhood and sort of trans femininity from this ke like hypersexuality. and i think that there is likethis it's this sort of i think like sexualizati of expressions of sort of trans background theme in a lot of trans history, which has tended to be very like focused on expert discourse, very focused on medicine, often like sex sort of disappears a little from those accounts. interesting ways. and so i think for me, what i would hope is that as trans labor history, i think, is a field that i hope that it doesn't i hope sex doesn't disappear from sexuality doesn't disappear from it. because i think it's the like i think this it's it's it's not always like this. like, like positive, like celebratorybus also i also worry like like if i also worryike a trans in which like, i guess like sex disappears, it's i feel complicated, fun.

i can jump on interesting. the court room. a place where sex has to disappear um. in some ways right. like in order to succeed in court, the claimants that i'm studying havevery firmly assert their and specifically their about trans employment law, this um we would todacategorize this is like an lgbtq sort of thing, right. but this is a very t excluded. eric like story. right. and often we see that exclusio coming. the lgbt part like the gay and lesbian people not wanting to deal with. are evolved enough or whatever. right but here we have as a legal strategy saying like, no no, no, no, no, i'm straight just like you, rig i fit really well into the suburban life, there's one of my claimants gives an interview where she says i'm not sleazy and i don't frequent right.

which is both i think a co her like not being gay, right? not being in part of this like gay bar community. so, yeah that an interesting bit there. yeah. i mean i can just a little to sortmean the nikita extent you're asking is the is the sort of story of gay andworkers distinct or is it similar? i mean, i think it depends what moment you're talking about, but at least in the most for most of the second lf of the 20th century, i think it's a fairly distinct story. t me try and explain why which is i, for gay workers for most of that period, the experience is one of vulnerability. but i, i that that relationship between employers and employees in at least the jobs thatge would characterize as the straight work world is one

defined by a sort of a mutual agreement to where employers have a vested interest in not seeing the the queerness, their workers, because these are vulnerable and there's a coercion and. i just don't think that same thing going on with trans workers at that time. i don't think therare embrace saying the fact that they have might be true in some places. and so i for trans people, there is the story if if they known it's of a much, more a much sharper downward bottom andecover a until late 20th century when i think maybe then there's a little bit more convergence in the story that's i don't know if would agree but yeah, if i could just jump in. washington, d.c. is aninteresting counterexample right? because there are at least two maintain earning their employment because of gay and partly of where working.

right. they're working for the civil , which is unionized right, yeah. so there in i think municipalities are more likely to add sexual to a protective category which means that trans people could theoretically they if they're willing to kind of go there could from those laws right. there's a there's a soldier is discharged from the army because she marries a trans man. and the army says that that means that she's gay and she no, i'm not gay. but then she sort of makes this joke. she goes through this whole fight for her to get her job back, to stay in the army and fails. but then she makes this jo civil service protects gay people. so if i'm gay, could just go work at this, go back to my same job and i'd be protected. she won't. she doesn't do. and she's like, well, my husband has a goodomewhere else,

but like there is some overlap. yeah, that's interesting. okay us now the end of our time like to have one more thank you to panelists. and now joining usprofessor cindy haimovitz georgia professor. what do you teach down there i teach gr