... having been breathed out

Both [the Federal Transient Program and the Civilian Conservation Corps] were gender-segregated institutions where men worked, ate, recreated, and slept together. But the transient in particular was associated with the distinctive sexual subculture of hoboes and bums in which homosexuality featured prominently. So the FTP was burdened from its inception by the image of the depraved bindle stiff. FTP officials responded by attempting to distinguish the virtue of the Depression-era transient from the hobo of old, suggesting that youthful migrants in particular needed to be protected from sexual advances by the latter type. This discourse of sexual vulnerability, however, did not mitigate but rather attached greater stigma to the program. Moreover, the FTP’s promoters were unable to overcome the moral suspicion aroused by single, able-bodied men on relief. Indeed, while federal aid for unattached men was clearly not the same thing as federal support for homosexuality, what is striking in the FTP records is the discursive linkage between them: critics of the FTP felt that the program not only enabled men to walk out on the dull responsibility of wife and family, but simultaneously established a state-sponsored haven for sex perverts.

—Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (bolding added)

[Note from 2014]: I’m back to Canaday in my quest to finish some long-overdue books, and my main obstacle to getting through this one is that I find practically every page so interesting that I have to stop and take notes; so expect a resumption of quote-blogging.

I’ve never read about the specifically queer history of this exact period before (the Great Depression in the US); this linkage in the popular imagination between transience and male homosexuality hadn’t really occurred to me. But now that I think about it, it’s very much of a piece with the pre-WWI US immigration policy, which took as a given that physical weakness or (perceived) gender indeterminacy in men would correspond with both laziness and sexual perversion. Fascinating that those assumptions went on to play such a key role in both the marketing and, later, the failure of the FTP part of the New Deal welfare program, even as the ostensibly more family-centric CCC flourished.

[Notes from 2018:]

(A follow-up post here about the failure of the FTP.)

(And another one here.)

(And yet another one here about how these assumptions carried over and perpetuated themselves in the exclusion of queer vets from the GI Bill, institutionally creating the kind of rootlessness and poverty in the queer population that were assumed to be an intrinsic condition and a cause of fear and moralizing. I still have so many feelings about this book!!)