Welcome to my latest queer history blog post! If you enjoy this post, then you’ll love my Historical Fiction novels. Find out more about my projects here, and sign up for my newsletter here to stay in touch!
Content Warnings: homophobic and queerphobic language (as represented in primary source historical records) and mention of self-harm
A common theme in history, especially that of the LGBTQIA+ community, is that it rarely progresses in linear fashion. Queer history is replete with forward momentum, backlash, tepid progress followed by steps backward as the tides of time come and go. So it is perhaps unsurprising that mid-20th century America saw remarkable developments in the awareness of queer identities, and simultaneous ostracization nearly unprecedented in the US. These developments centered around one notorious senator – Joseph McCarthy – but the seeds of the “Lavender Scare” preceded him. Tragically, its aftershocks endured long after the former crusader was relegated to ignominy.
The Lavender Scare, uniquely for this blog, is alarmingly recent history. Even so, current events suggest that its underlying motivations never truly dissipated in the American consciousness. How could thousands of dedicated federal employees find their lives destroyed on the whims of a singular man – and how can modern audiences ensure this shameful episode is never repeated?
Booming America
It is impossible to divorce the Lavender Scare from the tumultuous period which directly preceded it. World War II heralded the advent of the United States as a global superpower, a nation which emerged from the Great Dperession with the economic and military power to defeat two empires – Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The “Baby Boom” era which immediately followed (from 1945 – 1960) fundamentally reshaped American culture, religion and politics in ways that modern Americans continue to grapple with into the present day.
New realities, as American officials soon realized, meant new enemies as the Cold War solidified the emerging bipolar international order. The USSR came to dominate Eastern Europe with the fall of the proverbial Iron Curtain in the late 1940s. For the next forty years, global politics would be defined by a lethal staring contest between the two superpowers. Throughout this period, the fear of spreading Soviet-style communism influenced both US foreign policy and, as the Lavender Scare demonstrates, domestic repression of marginalized groups.
A Progressive Prologue?
Against this backdrop, the American queer community had itself undergone a blossoming over the preceding decades. Queer American history is, of course, as old as America itself – but existence (then as now) did not equate to tolerance, let alone acceptance.
But existence, and visibility, was certainly on the rise. I have noted in previous posts that the heyday of the Roaring 1920s was a particularly vibrant period of queer artistic and cultural achievement in America’s growing cities (the Harlem Renaissance as the prime example). Beyond the arts, rapid strides were being made in the nascent fields of psychology and sociology which informed the scientific understanding of (if not yet popular attitudes toward) queer identities. In pre-Nazi Germany, sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or Institute for Sexual Science, and was among the first researchers to articulate specific orientations and campaign against cultural homophobia.[1] He likewise pioneered descriptions of gender identities outside the notion of a binary and the wrote on the importance of enabling medical transition.
Another cornerstone development came with the work of the infamous Dr. Alfred Kinsey beginning in the 1930s. His foundational project on human sexuality culminated in two major reports in 1948 (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male) and 1953 (Sexual Behavior in the Human Female). Dr. Kinsey, a Harvard-trained entomologist, shocked the American medical community with his groundbreaking research based on thousands of candid, in-depth interviews.[2]
Dr. Kinsey concluded that human sexuality exists along a wide and diverse continuum, and both sexual desire and experience outside of strict heterosexuality are so common as to be nearly mundane. These astonishing reports, which flew in the face of conventional scientific and religious sentiment of the period, caused a furor among scientists, policymakers and the wider public alike. In an ironic twist of fate, the Kinsey reports themselves would be a key set piece in the coordinated backlash which was already brewing in Washington, D.C.
McCarthy Ascendant
It bears emphasis that, despite these positive developments in the decades before the Cold War began in earnest, queerphobic beliefs and attitudes prevailed throughout American culture and politics. Indeed, it can be argued that these tentative steps forward for queer recognition were themselves an instigator of the virulent response which followed: as ever, visible movements tend to produce counter-movements and regressive opposition.
Although queer enclaves (such as in San Francisco and Washington D.C.) were vibrant and fast-growing, these welcoming spaces represented the exception to the rule. Moreover, these environments were often subjected to invasive laws, police surveillance and active suppression.[3] Open expressions of any sexuality or gender identity outside strictly cishetnormative models was destructive to many professional career paths, including within the US government. Before the Lavender Scare commenced in 1950, a 1947 Executive Order under President Truman forbade employment or retention of employees who had engaged in “immoral or notoriously disgraceful conduct.” Scholars argue that although this so-called “Loyalty order” did not specify homosexual behavior, the State Department interpreted it as a directive to observe possible queer individuals in its ranks.[4] As would become evident later, some of these individuals were dismissed before the Senator McCarthy began his crusades.
Of course, homosexuality was outright forbidden throughout the US armed forces. Naoko Shibusawa notes that, ironically, active discharge of queer Americans from the military began in earnest after World War II had been won and the urgency for maximizing available service members had abated.[5]
This general unease with America’s burgeoning queer communities accelerated during the post-war period. A heightened sense of geopolitical threat was one factor: the Cold War shifted hearts and minds toward a decidedly Christian and capitalist (and by extension heteronormative) vision for US global leadership. Within this vision (bolstered by a swarm of marriages, suburbanization, rapid wealth accumulation and sudden population growth) there was little room for the advancement and experimentation with queer expression which gained ground in the pre-war era. Shibusawa writes:
“Partisan politics, no doubt, laid a basis for the lavender scare, but what also mattered was how Americans saw themselves and their ‘civilization’ at this juncture in world history, as their nation appeared to have ‘ascended’ to hegemony.”[6]
Senator McCarthy stepped into this fray on February 9, 1950, with a notorious diatribe alleging that over two hundred avowed Communists were scattered throughout the US State Department.[7] His speech on the Senate floor resulted in a political and media firestorm, raising the specter of Communist spies within the heart of the federal government. This moment was cemented as the beginning of the eponymous “Red Scare” in which government time and resources were wasted in the pursuit of the phantom Communists the Senator had vociferously warned against.
The Lavender Scare
But while the purported Communist spies from within were overwhelmingly a figment of McCarthy’s imagination, his next targets were very real indeed. On February 20th, Senator McCarthy took the floor again to what must have been rapt attention: this time, he specified that two of the individuals in question – Case 14 and Case 62 – were also homosexuals.
Their sexual orientations provided the linguistic basis for the “Lavender Scare” as it has been known to history. The lavender flower has long been associated with queer culture and especially homosexual men, at least since the 1920s.[8]
In that period, it may have been used as a slang epithet, when perceived queer, feminine men were derided as “Lavender Boys”.[9] By the 1950s, the connotations of the flower and its signature color would have been understood as a shorthand to describe the queer community.
The Senator did not only hurl accusations at the two likely hapless civil servants in question, but also offered his own pathology of homosexual individuals and their linkages to communism. Judith Adkins writes, “[a] top intelligence official had reportedly told [McCarthy] that ‘practically every active Communist is twisted mentally or physically in some way.’ McCarthy implied that the men in these two cases were susceptible to Communist recruitment because as homosexuals they had what he called ‘peculiar mental twists’.”
Unfortunately, McCarthy’s vitriolic analysis represented the prevailing mores and attitudes of his age. A memo written to the Secretary of State in 1950, just a few years after the Truman executive order and just weeks after McCarthy’s speech, affirmed that although queer employees did not appear to represent a real national security threat, nevertheless, “the tendency toward character weaknesses has led us to the conclusion that the known homosexual is unsuited for employment in the Department.”[10] Queerphobic prejudice intersected with and amplified other prejudices of the period: homosexuality was correlated with “uncivilized” and “Eastern” worldviews and behaviors, in juxtaposition with the supposed achievements of Western civilization that the Soviet Union now threatened.[11]
Some primary sources corroborate these views with startling literality: a sitting congressman contended, for example, that “the Russians are strong believers in homosexuality”, while Assistant Secretary of State James Webb (of later telescope fame) contested that the declines of the great ancient empires (such as Egypt and Greece) were directly correlated to their approval of gay relationships.[12] Fantastically misguided historical analysis aside, it is clear that Senator McCarthy was not isolated in his views of an ideological, global struggle which put queer American civil servants in the bullseye of a political tornado.
Malicious Meetings
There were thus several factors influencing Senator McCarthy to target queer Americans in his February 20th speech, and his sentiments were far from original. His invective had direct and immediate results. Traitorous communists would prove difficult to find, but queer Americans in the US government were not. The predators thus looked for prey where they could find it – measurable successes in investigating, then disposing, of queer federal employees.
Inspired by McCarthy’s outraged passion, US legislators and officials throughout government agencies began to purge suspected or known queer individuals with a coordinated vigor that was unprecedented in US history. Some of this had already been underway at the State Department: a few days after McCarthy’s speech, Deputy Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy confirmed that over ninety suspected homosexuals had already been removed from their jobs in testimony before the Senate Committee on Appropriations.[13] But what had heretofore been a quiet, internal operation largely confined to one agency was soon expanded through every corner of the federal administrative state.
In March 1950, the first bipartisan investigation of the Lavender Scare era was inaugurated by Republican Senator Kenneth Wherry and Democratic Senator J. Lister Hill. The Wherry-Hill Committee began reviewing suspected homosexuals employed in a range of departments, asking for cooperation from the respective agency heads and triggering dozens of resignations and firings.[14] At the time, removing employees (or employees submitting their resignations) may have been seen as a way to get ahead of events, and avoid possible public naming and shaming if the Senate committee forced any one department’s hand. If that was the intent, it may have backfired in the long run as the removals were perceived by the committee as a sign of forward momentum. As one source notes:
“The fact that a two-man Congressional committee triggered the resignation of about 100 members of the LGBTQ+ community only reaffirmed the threat of homosexuality and bolstered the need for investigation. Compared to the Red Scare, which produced little to no results, the Lavender Scare seemed legitimate.”[15]
Flush from this “success”, the Wherry-Hill committee was soon transitioned to the leadership of Senator Clyde Hoey. Six more bipartisan members were added to the proceedings; notably, Senator McCarthy was not on this committee, but was believed to be in consistent communication and reliably forwarding details about rumored queer federal employees to his Senate colleagues.[16] The investigation was also dramatically expanded to include every civilian arm – 53 branches – of the US government and the entirety of the military. The responses from the agencies, when tasked with their perspectives on the employment of homosexuals in the US government, were largely (but not uniformly) aligned with the Senate committee’s obvious intentions.
Judith Adkins cites two opposing examples from that tumultuous summer to demonstrate how attitudes toward the inquiry could vary. Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer wrote to the committee in support that “[t]he privilege of working for the United States Government should not be extended to persons of dubious moral character, such as homosexuals or sex perverts.”
In contrast, Howard Colvin, acting director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, took a much more sanguine view: “Since it is possible, according to our understanding of medical and psychiatric opinion on the subject, for a homosexual to lead a normal, well-adjusted life, we do not consider that such a person necessarily constitutes a bad security risk. We believe that each such case would have to be decided on its own merits.” Others did not necessarily outright contradict the committee, but made efforts to stymie its work. In this category, John Shover, director of personnel at the National Labor Relations Board, outright refused to allow the Hoey Committee investigators to review his personnel files and rebuked them in a rude fashion.[17]
Crackdown
Despite these (rare) examples of principled obstructionism, the Hoey Committee continued its work apace. The consequences would be vast, extending far beyond the immediate reaches of the federal government, with estimates that as many as 5,000 – 10,000 civil servants lost their careers amid the ravages of the Lavender Scare.[18]
Ultimately, the goal of the Hoey investigation was to provide recommendations to the federal government as to what it should do regarding the employment of queer Americans. In addition to the examination of the agencies’ staffers themselves, the committee compiled a lengthy report intended to advise the White House on any future executive action. To this end, the committee heard wide-ranging testimony from intelligence officials, police, psychologists, academics and medical professionals; sources note, however, that actual queer individuals were never called to testify for the committee’s public record.[19]
In December 1950, the committee released its final report, “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government.”[20] The final report’s assertions were a nauseating laundry list of the queerphobic prejudices which fueled the Lavender Scare: that queer individuals were morally weak, a profound security risk, mentally unwell and thus “not suitable for Government positions.”[21]
It went so far as to reprimand any officials with a laissez-faire attitude as failing to reckon with the depth of risk queer individuals in the US government represented. It recommended that agencies enforce “morality” requirements for federal employment with vigor, that law enforcement against homosexual activity be better coordinated and enforced between federal and municipal authorities (especially in Washington D.C., which was then as now home to a robust queer community). The report’s final draft included a warning that the committee might periodically conduct oversight to ensure its recommendations had been followed.
Astoundingly, worse was yet to come. Amid the Hoey investigation, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) compiled and then published the inaugural Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1952. While it is not clear that the APA and Hoey Committee were working in tandem, it is perhaps inarguable that their respective activities and results influenced one another. The DSM listed homosexuality as a mental illness, seemingly a rebuke to the findings promulgated by the Kinsey publications just a few years earlier.[22] The official DSM designation intensified the wider stigma and mistrust of queer individuals, effectively confirming the raison d’etre of the Hoey Committee.
The Hoey investigators were not unaware of the earlier Kinsey reports – but far from learning from these studies, the financiers of Kinsey’s research (namely the Rockefeller Foundation) were accused of openly abetting communism and moral degradation in the US.[23] Dr. Kinsey would ultimately pass in 1956 after his chastened funders abandoned his work. It would take decades for his research to receive the full credit it was due. Tragically, the designation of homosexuality in the DSM would not be revoked until 1973 after years of activism by the queer community (to be covered more in depth in Part II of this blog series).
Executive Order #10450
The Hoey report undoubtedly accelerated the removal (forcible and otherwise) of queer individuals from the US government’s ranks, but another disgraceful action would leave federal workers of any queer orientation imperiled for years to come.
In 1953, President Eisenhower issued Executive Order #10450, “Security Requirements for Government Employment,” which was explicitly grounded in the Hoey Committee report’s recommendations.[24] Whereas the earlier Truman-era Loyalty order hinted at removing queer individuals from US government service, the Eisenhower order outright named “sexual perversion” as among its disqualifying factors and thus forbade their employment in the civil services. Queer individuals were named as a distinct “security threat”, and therefore even private sector consultants and service providers to the US government were subject to these mandates.[25]
The Eisenhower order represented the apogee of the Lavender Scare, as its implementation represented the final warning to remaining queer federal employees – that their options to maintain their reputations, and their careers, were fast dwindling. While the records of resigned and fired employees are largely anonymous, they confirm the impossible situation in which these individuals suddenly found themselves.
Adkins writes:
“Unlike the Red Scare, the Lavender Scare featured no public naming of names and no dramatic spectacles in which the accused testified. That relative anonymity saved lives; public exposure almost certainly would have led to more suicides.”[26]
Nevertheless, she notes that the Hoey Committee’s unpublished records – the raw material behind the report – reveal the fragmented stories of those lives ruined by the Lavender Scare. They feature stories of gay men who tried desperately to suppress their sexuality, fired employees who no longer had the means to support sick and elderly relatives, and suicidal ideation.
More recent documentary efforts have resulted in public testimonies from those whose futures were impacted by the Lavender Scare during the decades which followed Eisenhower’s order. Navy Captain Joan Cassidy was among those whose story was recounted in a CBS interview: she recounts that she let go of her dream of becoming the first female Admiral “because I was gay and because I wasn’t sure I could hide it well enough.”[27]
Unfortunately, Eisenhower’s order would remain official federal policy for decades to come. It was only rescinded in 1995 by President Clinton before being fully revoked by President Obama in 2009.[28]
The Accuser Accused
This terrible story closes with a grim bit of historical justice. Senator McCarthy, who was perhaps more responsible than anyone for these horrifying events, became a victim of the Lavender Scare himself. Ironically, McCarthy would fall on the very sword he had wielded to cut down so many vulnerable Americans in his dramatic fall from grace.
Senator McCarthy, who had risen to prominence in Washington on the back of his toughly masculine, outsider image, made more than a few enemies in his self-aggrandizing quest to turn the capital on its head. As Andrea Friedman notes, “Joe McCarthy’s support of the lavender scare paved the way for the first use of sexual smears against him, by a man who would become one of his most implacable foes.”[29] The “foe” in question was journalist Drew Pearson, whose contempt for McCarthy’s poorly evidenced purge of Communists became a driving passion.
Pearson would go on to publish an article in May 1950 – just a few months after the spark which set off the Lavender Scare in earnest – accusing one of McCarthy’s legislative staffers of being arrested for a queer affair.[30] McCarthy, though aware of the reported arrest, refused to accept the staffer’s resignation. McCarthy, enraged at the journalist’s accusation, physically assaulted Pearson at a Washington, D.C. club and flipped the accusation of homosexuality back onto him.
Pearson’s reputation was wounded from this initial spat, but he funneled his hatred of McCarthy into a new friendship with fellow journalist, Hank Greenspun, the editor of the Las Vegas Sun. Greenspun, who apparently hated McCarthy with the same alacrity as Pearson, began to publish article after article calling McCarthy a closeted homosexual leveraging the rumor mill provided to him by a seething Pearson.[31]
While these rumors (albeit in black and white) were initially treated as just that, they provided invaluable fuel to McCarthy’s fellow Republicans when they readied a plan to finally dispose of him. McCarthy’s longtime and close staffer, Roy Cohn, proved the perfect foil as a famous photo of the ascendant McCarthy, listening intently to Cohn after a speech, took on new significance in Washington. Friedman writes, “[s]uggesting that McCarthy’s attachment to Cohn revealed his own disloyalty, the senator’s political enemies were able to cast sexual gossip in terms that could circulate broadly while still respecting journalistic conventions guarding powerful men’s privacy.”[32]
Soon, Washington swirled with innuendo around the supposed paramour of the haughty senator. It was ultimately the “Army McCarthy hearings” in 1954 which would broadcast this innuendo from sea to shining sea. These hearings were the final straw, wrecking McCarthy’s reputation once and for all and delegating him to pariah status in the city he once lorded over. In December 1954, the Senate (with the support of President Eisenhower) passed a vote of condemnation against McCarthy with a margin of 67 – 22.[33] The disgraced former senator passed away from alcoholism in May 1957. Fittingly, the man who ruined scores of lives ruined his own by the same means, suffering and perishing from the accusations which he had leveraged to reach the top of American political power.
A Movement Begins
While McCarthy’s bitter end is only marginally satisfying (given the path of destruction in his wake) there is fortunately another story which bookends the history of the Lavender Scare: that of resistance.
The 1950s had produced one of the most virulent periods of backlash against queer Americans, instigated at the highest levels of government. Nevertheless, this repression would spark a new grassroots movement of dissidents, activists, journalists and many others who saw queerphobia as an anti-American relic of McCarthyism. This emerging community was determined that McCarthy, and those who enacted his and others’ prejudices into federal regulation, would not have the final say.
For more on that story, Part II of this blog series is coming soon (and if you’re from the future, you can read it here).
[1] Gabrielle Bryan-Quamina, “Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institute for Sexual Science,” Science Museum Group, February 29, 2024, https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/magnus-hirschfeld-and-the-institute-for-sexual-science/.
[2] Rachel Wimpee and Teresa Iacobelli, “Funding a Sexual Revolution: The Kinsey Reports,” Rockefeller Archive Center, January 9, 2020, https://resource.rockarch.org/story/funding-a-sexual-revolution-the-kinsey-reports/.
[3] Washington D.C., which today boasts the highest percentage of queer residents per capita of any US state, was subjected to an especially vociferous scrutiny and state-sanctioned repression amid the Lavender Scare. It subsequently became a locus of resistance, which the author will explore more fully in Part II.
[4] Naoko Shibusawa, “The Lavender Scare and Empire: Rethinking Cold War Antigay Politics,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 4 (2012): 729, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44376170.
[5] Shibusawa, pgs. 729 – 30.
[6] Shibusawa, pg. 751.
[7] Judith Adkins, “’These People Are Frightened to Death’ Congressional Investigations and the Lavender Scare,” Prologue Magazine, Summer 2016, Vol. 48, No. 2 (publication of the National Archives), https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2016/summer/lavender.html.
[8] Sarah Prager, “Four Flowering Plants That Have Been Decidedly Queered,” JSTOR Daily, January 8, 2020, https://daily.jstor.org/four-flowering-plants-decidedly-queered/.
[9] “5 Flowers That Have Come to Symbolise the LGBTQ Movement & Why”, Blooming Haus, https://bloominghaus.com/news/pride-month-flowers/.
[10] “Cold War, Lavender Scare, and LGBTQ+ Activism,” National Park Service, updated October 8, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/cold-war-lavender-scare-and-lgbtq-activism.htm.
[11] Shibusawa, pg. 732.
[12] Ibid, pg. 724 and 742.
[13] Adkins, ibid.
[14] The National Archives Foundation, “The Lavender Scare,” accessed November 24, 2024, https://archivesfoundation.org/newsletter/the-lavender-scare/.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Adkins, ibid.
[17] Adkins, ibid.
[18] Kay M. Lim and Julie Kracov, “The lavender scare: How the federal government purged gay employees,” CBS News, June 9, 2019, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-lavender-scare-how-the-federal-government-purged-gay-employees/.
[19] National Archives Foundation, ibid.
[20] The report can be read in full here, but the author urges caution in reviewing this material.
[21] Adkins, ibid.
[22] Ray Levy Uyeda, “How LGBTQ+ Activists Got “Homosexuality” out of the DSM,” JSTOR Daily, May 26, 2021, https://daily.jstor.org/how-lgbtq-activists-got-homosexuality-out-of-the-dsm/.
[23] Wimpee and Iacobelli, ibid.
[24] The Executive Order can be read in full here.
[25] Adkins, ibid.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Lim and Kracov, ibid.
[28] National Archives Foundation, Ibid.
[29] Andrea Friedman, “The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip, and Cold War Politics,” American Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2005), pg. 1110, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40068331.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid, pg. 1113.
[33] “McCarthyism and the Red Scare,” The Miller Center, University of Virginia, accessed November 28, 2024, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/age-of-eisenhower/mcarthyism-red-scare.