Lavender scare

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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 communist sympathizers ("fellow travelers"), and the era of lavender scare "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]

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.[3] The phrase was also used by Confidential magazine, a periodical known for gossiping about the sexuality of politicians and prominent Hollywood stars.[4]

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.[5][6] 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".[7] McCarthy hired Roy Cohn–who died of AIDS and is widely believed to have been a closeted homosexual[8][9]–as chief counsel of his Congressional subcommittee. Together, McCarthy and Cohn, with the enthusiastic support of the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover (also believed by many to have been a closeted homosexual),[10] 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.[11][12][13] In 1953, during the final months of the Truman administration, the State Department reported that it had fired 425 employees for allegations of homosexuality.[14][15][16]

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."[17] 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.[18]

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.""[19] 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.[20]

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."[21]

Connections between gay rights groups and so-called subversive elements were not entirely baseless. 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 resigned when the membership condemned his politics as a threat to the organization he had founded.[22]

Crittenden Report of 1957

The 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."[23]

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.[24] As of September 1981, the Navy claimed it was still unable to fulfill a request for the Report's supporting documentation.[25]

Contemporary views of homosexuality

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.[26]

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."[1]

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 it is not an illness led the way to the eventual removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.[27]

Resistance

According to Lillian Faderman, the LGBT community formed a subculture of its own in this era, constituting "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. They were underground organizations that maintained the anonymity of their members.[1]

Documentary

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.[28][29]

See also

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References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ 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
  4. ↑ 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
  5. ↑ Representative Miller (NE). "Homosexuals in Government." Congressional Record 96:4 (March 29, 1950), H4527
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ The New York Times
  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ See J. Edgar Hoover#Sexuality.
  11. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. ↑ Rodger McDaniel, Dying for Joe McCarthy's Sins: The Suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt (WordsWorth, 2013), ISBN 978-0983027591
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. ↑ 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.
  17. ↑ 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
  18. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  19. ↑ Carlson, Dennis. "Gayness, multicultural education, and community." Beyond black and white: New faces and voices in the U.S. Schools (1997): 233-256.
  20. ↑ Field, Douglas, ed. American cold war culture. Edinburgh University Press, 2005.
  21. ↑ Lerner, Max, The Unfinished Country: A Book of American Symbols Simon and Schuster, 1959 pp 313-316
  22. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  23. ↑ Bérubé, 282. The Report is dated December 21, 1956, to March 15, 1957.
  24. ↑ Gibson, 356-67; Bérubé, 278
  25. ↑ Bérubé, 283; Haggerty, 45n38
  26. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  27. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  28. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  29. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

Sources

  • Timothy Haggerty, "History Repeating Itself: A Historical Overview of Gay Men and Lesbians in the Military before 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'," in Aaron Belkin and Geoffrey Bateman, eds., Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Debating the Gay Ban in the Military (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003)
  • Allan Bérubé, Coming out under fire: the history of gay men and women in World War Two (NY: Free Press, 1990)
  • E. Lawrence Gibson, Get Off my Ship : Ensign Berg vs. the U.S. Navy (NY: Avon, 1978)

Additional sources

  • Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), ISBN 978-1-55849-414-5
  • Rodger McDaniel, Dying for Joe McCarthy's Sins: The Suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt. (WordsWorth, 2013), ISBN 978-0983027591

External links

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