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Mother Jones: LGBTQ federal workers brace for a McCarthyist purge [1]
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Date: 2025-02-24
Mother Jones has a chilling new story documenting how he Trump Administration appears to be gearing up to purge the federal government of its LGBTQ workers — evoking the Lavender Scare that started in the 1950s to purge LGBTQ workers from the federal government. For historical context:
Seventy years ago, at the height of the McCarthy era—when federal employees with left-wing views were routinely interrogated and fired for being suspected communists—a related purge of queer workers was underway. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order listing “sexual perversion” as a basis for terminating federal civil service employees, on the theory that gay men and lesbians were susceptible to blackmail by the country’s enemies. In what became known as the Lavender Scare, at least 5,000 federal workers were fired for suspected homosexuality over the next two decades.
Fast forward to 2025, and LGBTQ workers at several federal agencies are once again being targeted by the federal government, based on interviews that Mother Jones has conducted with eight of these workers (all interviewees asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation).
During the first Trump administration, “Michael,” a gay man working at the Department of Interior, got together with some other queer people in his agency to form a monthly group for LGBTQ employees and anyone else who wanted to join. They organized Pride Month events, surveyed members on barriers they were facing in their jobs, and problem-solved with management. But that group has now been shut down — along with all other employee resource groups.
On February 5, the Office of Personnel Management—essentially the executive branch’s HR department—issued a memorandum telling agencies to “prohibit” employee resource groups that promote “unlawful DEIA initiatives” or “employee retention agendas based on protected characteristics.” The OPM memo is just one of many Trump actions generating fear of a new “Lavender Scare”—a purge that could roll back decades of LGBTQ gains and send those who remain in the government back into the closet. While Trump has appointed a couple of token gay officials—Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and special missions envoy Ric Grenell—he’s simultaneously declared war on transgender people, issuing edicts against so-called “gender ideology” and an onslaught of executive orders attempting to impose widespread discrimination against trans people in schools, hospitals, sports, homeless shelters, and prisons. The new administration’s anti-LGBTQ hostility doesn’t stop at the transgender community. On his second day in office, Trump rescinded a nearly 60-year-old order prohibiting discrimination by federal contractors. His appointees at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have halted that agency’s investigations of anti-LGBTQ discrimination. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security said it will now allow its agents to conduct surveillance based solely on a target’s gender identity or sexual orientation. And OPM opened a tipline for federal workers to report colleagues who have worked on DEI—a callback to an earlier era when employees were encouraged to report and out their gay coworkers.
In fact, federal agencies are now asking workers to identify LGBTQ people in the federal workforce.
In the US Department of Agriculture, multiple people have been asked to report the names of LGBTQ employee resource group leaders to higher-ranking officials, according to interviews with workers and a document reviewed by Mother Jones. In the Interior Department, too, Michael says that an official has informed him that they’ve been asked to produce the names of at least some participants in employee resource groups. “I never thought my involvement in an after-work group would land me here,” a board member of a USDA queer employee resource group says. “They’re not coming out and saying, ‘We want to fire the queers,’” Michael says. “They’re not asking people, ‘Are you gay? Are you lesbian?’ They’re asking, ‘Who is participating in DEI?’ But in the end it’s going to have the same effect.”
As I mentioned above, federal employee resource groups like Michael’s have been shutting down operations and wiping their websites, afraid of putting their members at risk in the openly hostile Trump administration.
“We’ve gone dark,” a former LGBTQ resource group leader in the Department of Agriculture tells Mother Jones. “We have pulled our contact lists off of government systems. Personally, as someone who has been very involved in queer spaces, I went through and deleted a bunch of emails and contacts, because I have lists of queer employees, and I am afraid if someone in the Trump administration gets their hands on it.” “I’m scared for the people I’ve been trying to help,” says a trans worker for the Interior Department who is involved in employee resource groups. “People came to us because they needed community, needed connection. We were trying to keep each other safe. Now, we’re all just this big target.”
Although similar employee resource groups for LGBTQ employees are fairly common at companies today, when I started working at a large corporation in the mid-1980s — fresh out of grad school and just coming to terms with being gay — no such group existed. Although I had started coming out in my personal life, I stayed in the closet during the four years that I worked at that company — constantly terrified that I’d be found out. That experience, combined with the HIV/AIDS crisis that started during that time, prompted me to become a community activist, and for the past 40 years I’ve been working in various was to advance LGBTQ equality. It saddens me to no end to see our country going back not just to those dark times of the 1980s for the LGBTQ community but back even further to the 1950s.
Not all hope is lost, of course. LGBTQ federal workers are still finding ways to support each other. Some employee resource groups have re-organized as nonprofits funded by member dues, which means they exist as separate entities from the government. And they are offering solidarity and advice to each other through private messages and non-work email groups.
And there’s the story of “Ryan,” a nonbinary employee at the USDA. They revealed their identity at work two years ago when they added “they/them” to their emails.
Then, at a recent staff meeting, employees were instructed to use a standard email signature that required them to remove their pronouns. Ryan broke down crying in front of their team. “I don’t know how to stop being who I am anymore,” they tell Mother Jones. “I am devastated and barely holding it together most of the time.” But, Ryan adds, “I’m not quitting. I’m going to make them fire me if they want me to go away.”
I know that I sure as hell am not going back without putting up a fight.
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