Lavender scare

Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn during the Army-McCarthy hearings

The lavender scare refers to the fear and persecution of homosexuals in the 1950s in the United States and United Kingdom, which paralleled the anti-communist campaign known as McCarthyism. Gay men and lesbians were often considered "fellow travelers" of the communists, and the era that the lavender scare began "may be seen as the time when homosexuals became the chief scapegoats of the Cold War."[1]

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."[2]

A feature-length documentary film by producer-director Josh Howard, The Lavender Scare, based on Johnson's book, was released in the summer of 2013.[3][4]

Etymology

The term for this persecution was popularized by David K. Johnson's 2004 study of this anti-homosexual campaign, The Lavender Scare, which drew its title from the term "lavender lads", used repeatedly by Senator Everett Dirksen as a synonym for homosexuals. In 1952 Dirksen said that a Republican victory in the November elections would mean the removal of "the lavender lads" from the State Department.[5] The phrase was also used by Confidential magazine, a periodical known for gossiping about the sexuality of politicians and prominent Hollywood stars.[6]

History

In 1950, the same year that Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed 205 communists were working in the State Department, Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy said that the State Department had allowed 91 homosexuals to resign.[7][8] 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".[9] McCarthy hired Roy Cohn–later widely believed to be a closeted homosexual[10][11]–as chief counsel of his Congressional subcommittee. Together, McCarthy and Cohn were responsible for the firing of scores of gay men from government employment and strong-armed many opponents into silence using rumors of their homosexuality.[12][13][14] In 1953, during the final months of the Truman administration, the State Department reported that it had fired 425 employees for allegations of homosexuality.[15][16][17]

McCarthy often used accusations of homosexuality as a smear tactic in his anti-communist crusade, often combining the Second Red Scare with the Lavender Scare. On one occasion, he went so far as to announce to reporters, "If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you've got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker."[18] Some historians have argued that, in linking communism and homosexuality and psychological imbalance, McCarthy was employing guilt-by-association if evidence for communist activity was lacking.[19]

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; lack of conformity; they were scheming and manipulative and, most importantly, would put their own agendas above others, in the eyes of the general population.[1] McCarthy also associated homosexuality and communism as "threats to the "American way of life.""[20] Homosexuality was directly linked to security concerns, and more government employees were dismissed because of their homosexual sexual orientation than because they were left-leaning or communist. George Chauncey noted that, "The specter of the invisible homosexual, like that of the invisible communist, haunted Cold War America," and homosexuality (and by implication homosexuals themselves) were constantly referred to not only as a disease, but also as an invasion, like the perceived danger of communism and subversives.[21]

Senator Kenneth Wherry similarly attempted to invoke a connection between homosexuality and anti-nationalism. He said in an interview with Max Lerner that "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."[22]

Connections between gay rights groups and so-called subversive elements were not merely a figment of the imaginations of demagogues. The Mattachine Society, one of the earliest gay rights groups in the United States, was founded by Harry Hay, a former member of the Communist Party USA, who was kicked out of the gay rights group he'd founded for his ties to the party.[23]

Psychological atmosphere and paranoia

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.[24]

John Loughery says that: "few events indicate how psychologically wracked America was becoming in the 1950s [...] than the presumed overlap of the Communist and the homosexual menace."[1]

Resistance

During this time, many LGBT organisations went underground and the LGBT community formed a subculture of their own. Lillian Faderman has said that this era became "not only a choice of sexual orientation, but of social orientation as well." The Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis (which formed the homophile movements of the U.S.) were in many ways defined by McCarthyism and the lavender scare.[1]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Prono, Luca. "McCarthyism". glbtq.com. Retrieved March 9, 2015.
  2. ↑ Simpson, Alan K.; McDaniel, Rodger (2013). "Prologue". Dying for Joe McCarthy's Sins. WordsWorth Press. p. x. ISBN 978-0983027591.
  3. ↑ Melendez, Barbara (June 9, 2010). "Book Lavender Scare To Be Documentary". University of South Florida News.
  4. ↑ "Film Documents Antigay Witch Hunt". The Advocate. March 5, 2012. Retrieved June 15, 2012.
  5. ↑ Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd ed. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 44; Byron C. Hulsey, Everett Dirksen and his Presidents: How a Senate Giant Shaped American Politics (University Press of Kansas, 2000), 48–9
  6. ↑ Samuel Bernstein, "Lavender Lads Bartone Babes", The Advocate, February 27, 2007. On the association of a variety colors with homosexuality, see Venetia Newall, "Folklore and Male Homosexuality", Folklore, vol. 97, no. 2, 1986, 126
  7. ↑ Representative Miller (NE). "Homosexuals in Government." Congressional Record 96:4 (March 29, 1950), H4527
  8. ↑ "THAILAND: Smiling Jack". Time. August 22, 1955.
  9. ↑ "Perverts Called Government peril". April 19, 1950.
  10. ↑ The New York Times
  11. ↑ Life Magazine
  12. ↑ Johnson, David K. (2004). The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. University of Chicago Press. . ISBN 0-226-40190-1.
  13. ↑ Rodger McDaniel, Dying for Joe McCarthy's Sins: The Suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt (WordsWorth, 2013), ISBN 978-0983027591
  14. ↑ White, William S. (May 20, 1950). "Inquiry by Senate on Perverts Asked". New York Times. Retrieved December 29, 2014.
  15. ↑ "The Legacy of Discriminatory State Laws, Policies, and Practices, 1945-Present". Williams Institute, UCLA.
  16. ↑ "126 Perverts Discharged". New York Times. March 26, 1952. Retrieved December 29, 2014.
  17. ↑ Berard, Lauren B., "Something Changed: The Social and Legal Status of Homosexuality in America as Reported by The New York Times" (2014). Honors Theses. Paper 357.
  18. ↑ Cuordileone, K.A. "'Politics in an Age of Anxiety': Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis in American Masculinity, 1949-1960" The Journal of American History 87 (2) (2000): 515-545
  19. ↑ Damousi, Joy; Plotkin, Mariano Ben (5 January 2012). Psychoanalysis and Politics: Histories of Psychoanalysis Under Conditions of Restricted Political Freedom. Oxford University Press, USA. p. 221. ISBN 978-0-19-992316-8.
  20. ↑ Carlson, Dennis. "Gayness, multicultural education, and community." Beyond black and white: New faces and voices in the U.S. Schools (1997): 233-256.
  21. ↑ Field, Douglas, ed. American cold war culture. Edinburgh University Press, 2005.
  22. ↑ Lerner, Max, The Unfinished Country: A Book of American Symbols Simon and Schuster, 1959 pp 313-316
  23. ↑ Lillian Faderman; Stuart Timmons (2006). Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians. Basic Books. p. 113. ISBN 978-0-465-02288-5.
  24. ↑ Ayyar, Raj. "Historian David K. Johnson: Exposes the U.S. Government's Anti-Gay Crusades". Gay Today.

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