Lavender Scare
[7] Well before the congressional investigations of 1950, U.S. institutions had already developed an intricate and effective system of regulations, tactics, and personnel to uncover homosexuals that would become enforcement mechanisms during the Lavender Scare.
[3] Margot Canaday and Michael S. Sherry have stated that Cold War homophobia (as well as a "moral sex panic" that dates back to the Great Depression) occurred in a context of "perceived shifts in gender relations, race relations, the ongoing dislocations of late capitalism, continuing urbanisation, economic and foreign crises, post-war adjustment, and the entrenchment of a consumer society and culture allegedly dominated by women.
In 1940, President Roosevelt and his Selective Service advisers were convinced by psychiatrists of the need to implement screening programs to determine the mental health of potential soldiers as to reduce the cost of psychiatric rehabilitation for returning veterans.
The results were not released until December, but in the meantime federal job losses due to allegations of homosexuality increased greatly, rising from approximately 5 to 60 per month.
[11] On April 19, 1950, the Republican National Chairman Guy George Gabrielson said that "sexual perverts who have infiltrated our Government in recent years" were "perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists".
Together, McCarthy and Cohn – with the enthusiastic support of the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover – were responsible for the firing of scores of gay men and women from government employment, and strong-armed many opponents into silence using rumors of their homosexuality.
"[31] At least one recent historian has argued that, by linking communism and homosexuality with psychological imbalance, McCarthy was employing guilt-by-association when evidence for communist activity was lacking.
[32] Political rhetoric at the time often linked communists and homosexuals, and common beliefs among the public were similar, stating that both were "morally weak" or "psychologically disturbed," along with being godless and undermining traditional families.
Specifically, Truman's loyalty program had been extended through this executive order: "sexual perversion" was added to a list of behaviors that would keep a person from holding a position in government.
[41] Both homosexuals and Communist Party members were seen as subversive elements in American society who all shared the same ideals of antitheism, rejection of bourgeois culture and middle-class morality, and lack of conformity.
[1] David K. Johnson notes that without an idealized traditional American moral fiber, any citizen could succumb to immoral temptations such as homosexuality; and they could ultimately be seduced by communism.
[3] Shibusawa states that the supposed threat in the rise of homosexuality utilised by competing political economies was compounded by an ideological element to the wave of homophobia that produced the Lavender Scare in post-war America with its connection to empire.
Notions about sexuality were part of the narratives that shaped worldviews, defined relationships, and guided action;[3] agitation about potentially traitorous gays, moreover, derived also from efforts to distinguish American civilization or modernity, not only from the Soviets, but also from the "masses" of the decolonizing world.
He states this was evident not only in the Luce media, but also in another widely read publication: the magazine Reader's Digest, which served pedagogical, nationalist, and internationalist purposes during the Cold War.
[33] One such report contained the statements of the head of the DC Metropolitan Police Department vice squad, Lieutenant Roy Blick, who testified that 5,000 homosexuals lived in Washington, D.C., and that around 3,700 were federal employees.
[33] Lt. Blick's comments, which were speculative at best, further fueled the media storm surrounding the gays-in-government controversy; the Wherry-Hill preliminary investigation convinced the Senate to launch a full-scale congressional exploration.
[52] The Hoey Committee consulted with and heard testimony from law enforcement, judicial authorities, military and governmental security officers, and medical experts.
[53] The Hoey Committee's conclusive report, released in mid-December that year, ignored the ambiguities of testimony and deemed authoritatively that there was "no place in the United States Government for persons who violate the laws or the accepted standards of morality," especially those who "bring disrepute to the Federal service by infamous or scandalous conduct," stating that lesbians and gay men were "unsuitable" for federal employment because they were "security risks" as well as people engaged in illegal and immoral activities.
"[55] The authoritative findings of the Wherry-Hill and Hoey Committee congressional investigations directly helped the Lavender Scare move beyond a strictly Republican rhetoric towards bipartisan appeal, and purging lesbians and gay men from federal employment quickly became part of standard, government-wide policy.
[56] The major purpose and achievement of the Wherry-Hill and Hoey Committees was the construction and promotion of the belief that homosexuals in the military and federal government constituted security risks who, as individuals or working in conspiracy with members of the Communist Party, threatened the safety of the nation.
[60] Earlier in 1952, Nevada publisher Hank Greenspun wrote that McCarthy "often engaged in homosexual activities" and was a frequent patron at the White Horse Inn, a Milwaukee gay bar.
[64] The 1957 Crittenden Report of the United States Navy Board of Inquiry concluded that there was "no sound basis for the belief that homosexuals posed a security risk" and criticized the prior Hoey Report: "No intelligence agency, as far as can be learned, adduced any factual data before that committee with which to support these opinions" and said that "the concept that homosexuals necessarily pose a security risk is unsupported by adequate factual data.
He states that this did not seem to matter because of the factual precedent of a gay U.S. government employee or military man being blackmailed into betraying his nation by the Soviet enemy—or even by the recent Axis enemies—had not actually occurred; it was the association between homosexuality and potential disloyalty which meant distinction between the two became blurred.
Significant to wider views of homosexuality in America during the lavender scare were the attempts to "clean up" public spaces from the supposed moral threat of gay people.
According to John Loughery, author of a study of gay identity in the 20th century, "few events indicate how psychologically wracked America was becoming in the 1950s ... than the presumed overlap of the Communist and the homosexual menace.
"[73] However, women in governmental positions, such as Madeline Tress, who worked for the Department of Commerce, were subject to an intense interrogation in April 1958 surrounding her sexuality which was subsequently followed by a confession of homosexual activity in her youth.
[79] Distinct from the other Mattachine Societies established in California and other parts of the U.S. in the 1950s, Kameny's MSW held more militant values beyond assimilation into heterosexual culture.
Fiction by authors including John Horne Burns, Truman Capote, Charles Jackson, Carson McCullers, Thomas Hal Phillips, Jo Sinclair, Tereska Torrès, and Gore Vidal led readers to question the nation's collective hostility to homosexuality.
[11] Though the main vein of McCarthyism ended in the mid-1950s when the 1956 Cole v. Young ruling severely weakened the ability to fire people from the federal government for discriminatory reasons,[84] the movement that was born from it, the Lavender Scare, lived on.
[89] The 2016 opera Fellow Travelers, based on the 2007 novel by Thomas Mallon, is set in McCarthy-era Washington D.C. and centers on the love affair between two men working for the federal government during the Lavender Scare.
