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LGBTQ Literature: The Lavender Scare Revisited [1]
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Date: 2023-04-30
Johnson begins The Lavender Scare with a familiar historical moment: Senator Joseph McCarthy's 1950 speech in Wheeling, West Virginia. You know, the one in which he famously claimed that 205 card-carrying Communists were working in the State Department. We always remember that moment as the "beginning" of McCarthyism, which supposedly lasts from 1950 until McCarthy's censure in 1954—even though the roots of McCarthyism stretch back way before his Wheeling speech (and, indeed, before McCarthy himself), while its effects and excesses lingered long after 1954.
In the same month that McCarthy delivered his fiery address in Wheeling, a lesser known—but very important—statement was issued by the State Department, in response to McCarthy's charges. Johnson explains:
Appearing before a congressional committee, Deputy Undersecretary John Peurifoy denied that the department employed any actual Communists. At the same time, however, he revealed that a number of persons considered to be security risks had been forced out, and that among these were ninety-one homosexuals. Rather than see the revelation as evidence of an effective security system, many interpreted it as proof that the State Department--perhaps the entire government--was infiltrated with sexual perverts. Members of Congress demanded to know who hired the ninety-one, whether they found jobs in other government departments, and if there were any more. Seeming to confirm McCarthy's charges about subversives in the State Department, Peurifoy's revelation prompted concern and outrage throughout the nation, heated debates on the floors of Congress, congressional committee investigations, countless newspaper articles, and numerous White House meetings. It eventually led to the ouster of thousands of government employees. It marked the beginnings of a Lavender Scare.
Peurifoy's statement—and, along with it, the Lavender Scare—has been lost to history. This, in spite of the reality that many in the 1950s considered homosexuals posed a larger threat to national security than Communists. As Johnson details, President Harry Truman's advisors warned him in a memo:
..the country is more concerned about the charges of homosexuals in the Government than about Communists.
One congressman said of his constituents:
Many of them tell me they are concerned before they get to the issue of communism or loyalty with this issue of morality and decency.
By the end of 1950, the "panic on the Potomac" (as journalists called it) with regard to "perversion" in the government had cost approximately 600 federal civil servants their jobs. According to Johnson:
In the State Department alone, security officials boasted that on average they were firing one homosexual per day, more than double the rate for those suspected of political disloyalty.
Despite the reputation of the 1950s as a time of sexual repression (and repression of sexual discourse), talk of homosexuality in the federal government was widespread. But, as Johnson notes, much of it—though not all of it, by any means—was coded and cryptic.
One 1953 story from the Buffalo Evening News, for example, was devoted entirely to the perceived problem of homosexuals in the State Department yet never used the words "homosexual" or "sexual pervert”—the favored terms in the 1950s for men and women attracted to members of their own sex. It referred instead only to "men of unconventional morality" whose "habits make them especially vulnerable to blackmail."
Indeed, as Johnson explains, the term "security risk”—to be distinguished from political disloyalty in the form of overt Communism—came to be intertwined with "deviant" sexuality. The idea that homosexuals were more susceptible to Communist blackmail and were therefore more likely to divulge state secrets, in the minds of the American public and certainly the architects of the Lavender Scare, justified the intense effort to rid the federal government of gays and lesbians. This is not to say that security risks were always homosexuals; but homosexuals were always security risks. Those who drank—not a little, but too much—were security risks. Those who had "loose lips" and talked—not a little, but too much—were security risks. However, all it took was one homosexual encounter to brand somebody a security risk for life. This is despite the fact that there is not a single known case of a homosexual being blackmailed into divulging state secrets. "Security risk" became a euphemism for homosexuality, and the idea fueled the purges.
The purge of the State Department was only the beginning. In the years that followed, thousands of gays and lesbians (more gay men than lesbians, although both groups were affected) lost their jobs and faced anti-gay harassment because of this climate of fear. In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450, which required all government agencies and contractors to fire anybody who met the following criteria:
Any criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct, habitual use of intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, sexual perversion.
We'll likely never know the full impact of the Lavender Scare. But it ran deep—much deeper than historians prior to the 21st century have recognized. Even as the overt Communist witch hunts drew to a close in the mid-1950s, the Lavender Scare lived on in policy. America eventually stopped talking about it, but not because it was no longer happening; it was simply routinized and institutionalized in the federal bureaucracy. It became the new normal.
Indeed, it could be said that the Lavender Scare and the associated anti-gay climate ran even deeper and was much more effective than the Red Scare with which we are all so familiar. It was not simply an offshoot of the anti-communist hysteria fostered by McCarthyism—it was intertwined with anti-communism. Anti-gay hysteria was absolutely central to the anti-communism of the 1950s. So why do we still know so little about the Lavender Scare? Why is it still either left out of discussions of McCarthyism or assigned a minor role in the broader history? Why do we have only one full-length book on this topic?
Johnson offers some theories. For one thing, there is our obsession as historians with McCarthy himself. McCarthy, as Johnson explains, was never focused that much on homosexuality (unlike his closeted buddy Roy Cohn).
Both the popular imagination and the historiography of 1950s witch-hunting focus on the role of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Even gay people who lived in D.C. in the 1950s and watched the purges unfold attributed them to McCarthy, who was the first major politician to publicly suggest that there were homosexuals in the government and that they posed a risk to national security. His speeches often made passing references to "Communists and queers," and certainly the political climate of fear and accusation he spawned fed these purges. But McCarthy was not the principal backer of the homosexual purges. After his initial round of publicity in early 1950, he essentially dropped the subject of homosexuals in the State Department. As one political commentator remarked, "When he started his probe he didn't know about the homosexual angle. Now, he's uncertain what to do about it." Despite pressure from other Republican leaders who felt that such charges were creating "more of a stir," McCarthy was not involved in any of the congressional investigations of hearings into homosexuals in government. Though he was a member of the congressional committee that spent several months examining the homosexuals-in-government issue, McCarthy mysteriously recused himself from those hearings. The press suggested he did not want to be in the position of judging his own accusations. A knowledgeable observer at the time suggested that he did not pursue the "homosexual angle" more aggressively because he was afraid of a boomerang. As an unmarried, middle-aged man, he was subject to gossip and rumor about his own sexuality. So it fell to McCarthy's more senior colleagues such as Senators Styles Bridges, Kenneth Wherry, and Clyde Hoey to press the issue more aggressively. Whatever the reason for his reticence, turning the spotlight on McCarthy tends, paradoxically, to keep the antigay purges in the shadows.
I think Johnson is right here. McCarthy lends a name and a face to this 1950s culture, but we seem to forget that he was as much an exploiter of already existing anti-communist anxieties as he was a creator of said anxieties. Focusing on McCarthy does a disservice to a serious study of the politics and culture of this period, not the least of which is a historical amnesia regarding the Lavender Scare.
As I said above—and as Johnson describes in great detail in the book—understanding the Lavender Scare is essential not only to comprehending the nature of anti-communism in the 1950s. It is also necessary to understand the development of the gay rights movement. The federal government's harassment of and discrimination against gays and lesbians provided fuel to a burgeoning "homophile" movement in the 1950s and 1960s. From Scott Wooledge's diary on the Lavender Scare from a few years ago:
This chapter of American history is little known or discussed, but the reverberations in modern day politics are great and many. It was the genesis of one of the 20th century's most ubiquitous and indomitable LGBT rights activists, Dr. Frank Kameny, who was himself a victim of this purge. He was the first to actually fight back, attempting to petition the United States Supreme Court for redress (they denied his requested day in court).
Frank Kameny, who lost his job with the federal government as an astronomer because of the Lavender Scare, went on to lead the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. (a decidedly more "radical" organization than the larger Mattachine Society).
Starting in the last 1950s, a handful of gay men and lesbians began fighting back; among the first of these pioneers was the late Frank Kameny, who had been fired from his job at the Army Map Service in 1957 for his sexuality. These early gay rights activists lobbied, picketed the White House, and filed lawsuits charging they were being discriminated against and made to be second-class citizens. And they ultimately won, both in the courts of law and the court of public opionion. The government could never prove that there was any connection between their off-duty conduct and their ability to perform their official duties. Thanks to the courage of Kameny and other founders of the modern gay rights movement, Washington is a very different place for gay men and lesbians today. Rather than leading a witch hunt for homosexuals, the federal government is one of the most progressive of employers. In 1998, President Clinton signed an executive order prohibiting discrimination in federal employment on the grounds of sexual orientation. One of the last gasps of this government witch hunt only ended last year, with the final demise of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
In 2011, just before his death, Kameny talked about this experience and his ensuing activism at an LGBT Pride Month event:
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If you haven’t read The Lavender Scare yet, I highly recommend it, as there is much more covered by the book than I was able to capture in this diary. There is also a documentary with the same title, based on Johnson’s book:
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You might also enjoy this conversation with Johnson and documentary producer Josh Howard:
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LGBTQ LITERATURE SCHEDULE (2023)
If you are interested in taking any of the following dates, please comment below or send a message to Chrislove. We’re always looking for new writers, and anything related to LGBTQ literature is welcome!
January 29: Chrislove
February 26: Chrislove
March 26: Chrislove
April 30: Chrislove
May 28: Clio2
June 25: OPEN
July 30: OPEN
August 27: OPEN
September 24: OPEN
October 29: OPEN
November 26: OPEN
December 31: CANCELED
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
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