Lavender scare facts for kids
The "lavender scare" was a moral panic about homosexual people in the United States government which led to their mass dismissal from government service during the mid-20th century. It contributed to and paralleled the anti-communist campaign which is known as McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare. Gay men and lesbians were said to be national security risks and communist sympathizers, which led to the call to remove them from state employment. It was thought that gay people were more susceptible to being manipulated, which could pose a threat to the country.
The Lavender Scare – the federal government's official response to both a visible lesbian and gay community and a perceived homosexual menace – normalized persecution of homosexuals through bureaucratic institutionalization of homophobia. Former U.S. Senator Alan K. Simpson has written:
The so-called 'Red Scare' has been the main focus of most historians of that period of time. A lesser-known element ... and one that harmed far more people was the witch-hunt McCarthy and others conducted against homosexuals.
Contents
Etymology
The term for this persecution was popularized by David K. Johnson's 2004 book which studied this anti-homosexual campaign, The Lavender Scare. The book drew its title from the term "lavender lads", used repeatedly by Senator Everett Dirksen as a synonym for homosexual males. In 1952, Dirksen said that a Republican victory in the November elections would mean the removal of "the lavender lads" from the State Department. The phrase was also used by Confidential magazine, a periodical known for gossiping about politicians and prominent Hollywood stars.
Executive Order 10450
In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which set security standards for federal employment and barred homosexuals from working in the federal government. The restrictions set in place were cause for hundreds of gay people to be forcibly outed and fired from the State Department. The executive order was also the cause for the firing of approximately 5,000 gay people from federal employment; this included private contractors and military personnel. Not only did the victims lose their jobs, but also they were forced out of the closet and thrust into the public eye as lesbian or gay.
By the mid-1950s, similar repressive and oppressive policies had gone into effect in state and local governments which extended the prohibitions on the employment of lesbians and gay men to cover twelve million workers – more than twenty percent of the United States labor force – who now had to sign oaths attesting to their moral purity to get or to keep their jobs.
In 1973, a federal judge ruled a person's orientation could not be the sole reason for termination from federal employment, and in 1975 the United States Civil Service Commission announced that they would consider applications by gays and lesbians on a case by case basis. Executive Order 10450 stayed partly in effect until 1995 when President Bill Clinton rescinded the order and put in place the "don't ask, don't tell" policy for admittance of gays into the military. In 1998 the order's language was also repealed when Clinton signed Executive Order 13087. And in 2017 the order was explicitly repealed when Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13764.
Association of communism with "subversives"
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. They were also seen as scheming and manipulative and, most importantly, would put their own agendas above others in the eyes of the general population. McCarthy also associated homosexuality and communism as "threats to the 'American way of life'." [Homosexuals and communists] were perceived as hidden subcultures with their own meeting places, literature, cultural codes, and bonds of loyalty. [They] were thought to recruit the psychologically weak or disturbed [and] many believed the two were working together to undermine the government.
Senator Kenneth Wherry similarly attempted to invoke a connection between homosexuality and anti-nationalism. He said in an interview with Max Lerner: "You can't hardly separate homosexuals from subversives." Later in that same interview, he drew the line between patriotic Americans and gay men: "But look, Lerner, we're both Americans, aren't we? I say, let's get these fellows [closeted gay men in government positions] out of the government."
The term "Homintern" was coined in the 1930s, possibly by Cyril Connolly, W. H. Auden, or Harold Norse, as a camp term playing off of "Comintern" (Communist International). It was first used to describe an imagined group of gay men who controlled the art world, and later used in reference to "a fantastical gay international that sought to control the world". In 1952, an article written by R. G. Waldeck argued that this conspiracy was a real and important reason to expel homosexual people from the State Department, even more important than the possibility of blackmail, and this article was read into the Congressional Record and cited by others.
While the Mattachine Society was founded by Harry Hay, a former member of the Communist Party USA, Hay resigned from the society when the membership condemned his politics as a threat to the organization he had founded.
Contemporaneous views of homosexuality
Washington D.C. had a fairly large and active gay community before McCarthy launched his campaign against homosexuals, but as time went on and the climate of the Cold War spread, so too did negative views of homosexuals. Because social attitudes toward homosexuality were overwhelmingly negative and the psychiatric community regarded homosexuality as a mental disorder, gay men and lesbians were considered susceptible to blackmail, thus constituting a security risk. U.S. government officials assumed that communists would blackmail homosexual employees of the federal government to provide them classified information rather than risk exposure. 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." The Crittenden Report remained secret until 1976. Navy officials claimed they had no record of studies of homosexuality, but attorneys learned of its existence and obtained it through a Freedom of Information Act request. As of September 1981, the Navy claimed it was still unable to fulfill a request for the Report's supporting documentation.
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."
The research of Evelyn Hooker, presented in 1956, and the first conducted without a polluted sample (gay men who had been treated for mental illness) dispelled the illusory correlation between homosexuality and mental illness that prior research, conducted with polluted sampling, had established. Hooker presented a team of three expert evaluators with 60 unmarked psychological profiles from her year of research. She chose to leave the interpretation of her results to others, to avoid potential bias. The evaluators concluded that in terms of adjustment, there were no differences between the members of each group. Her demonstration that homosexuality is not a form of mental illness led to its eventual removal from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Experiences of men and women
Johnson argues that lesbians were at less risk of persecution than gay men because "lesbians have traditionally had less access to public space than men and therefore were less vulnerable to arrest and prosecution for their homosexuality." However, Madeleine Tress, who worked for the Department of Commerce, was subject to an interrogation in April 1958. Following an intense interrogation and admitting homosexual activity in her youth, Tress was forced to resign from her job.
Gay men and lesbians were forced into an underground community due to investigations by the government into anyone suspected of being a homosexual. "Gay men and lesbians would serve as discreet character references for one another on security clearance checks." 'An unknown number of gay men and lesbians, stripped of their livelihoods, facing embarrassment and unemployment, took their own lives." This highlights the impact this persecution had on individuals' psychological well-being.
Resistance
One of the first and most influential members of the gay rights movements, Frank Kameny was working as an astronomer for the United States Army Map Service, but was fired as a result of the Lavender Scare in 1957 and could never find another job in the United States federal government again. This led to Kameny devoting his life to the gay rights movement. In 1965, four years before the Stonewall Riots, Kameny picketed the White House on the grounds of gay rights.
A group of eight lesbians in San Francisco formed a group called Daughters of Bilitis in September 1955. It was initially set up as way 'to meet and interact with other lesbians in a safe environment.' They later sought to change laws criminalising homosexuality.
Legacy
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, the movement that was born from it, the Lavender Scare, lived on. One such way was that Executive Order 10450, which was not rescinded until 1995, continued to bar gays from entering the military. Another form of the Lavender Scare that persisted was the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, also referred to as the FLIC and the Johns Committee. The FLIC was founded in 1956 and was not disbanded until 1964. The purpose of the committee was to operate within Florida continuing the work of the Lavender Scare by investigating and firing public school teachers who were gay. During its active years the FLIC was responsible for more than 200 firings of alleged gay teachers.
In January 2017, the State Department formally apologized following suggestion by Senator Ben Cardin. Cardin also noted that investigations by the state department into homosexuality of federal employees continued as late as the 1990s.
Documentary
The Lavender Scare, directed by Josh Howard and narrated by Glenn Close, is a documentary film that recounts the events of the Lavender Scare. David K. Johnson is part of the project, as the film is based on his book. To help with funding, Josh Howard created a Kickstarter that met its goal in donations. The film was completed, screened at more than 70 film festivals around the world, and opened at theaters in New York City and Los Angeles in 2019. PBS televised the film on June 18, 2019.
See also
In Spanish: Terror lila para niños
