184. The Lavender Scare

00:00 – Snarky Opener

It's like ABBA said, that damn history book on the shelf, it's always repeating itself.

00:24 – Episode Introduction

Hello my LGBTQuties and welcome back to another episode of A Jaded Gay. I'm Rob Loveless and today I am a non-jaded gay because it's scary season.

You know me, I love this time of year. I've been drinking pumpkin coffee since August. I'm actually drinking some now.

Little ASMR action for you there. It's my Dunkin' Pumpkin Signature Iced Pumpkin Latte with protein milk, not sponsored. I've been getting together with friends for tarot readings, fall crafts, and candle making.

I've been watching more horror movies than usual to relax. So yeah, life is good. And I know it might sound odd to say that watching horror movies helps me relax, but sometimes real life is scarier than horror.

01:00 – The Lavender Scare

Which brings us to today's episode. We are going to be talking about an era of LGBTQ+ history that's often been overlooked, and that is the Lavender Scare of the mid-1900s. Perfect for scary season.

Like we've talked about in the past, there's a lot of LGBTQ+ history that many of us didn't learn about growing up. For most of us, our queer history starts with the Stonewall Riots. But LGBTQ+ people have been around forever, and the trials and tribulations they went through paved the way for the Stonewall Riots and more modern activism.

And that's why I want to talk about the Lavender Scare today, not only because of the impact it had on LGBTQ+ people, but because the rhetoric surrounding it feels very reminiscent of the current political climate. So, we're going to get into it. But first, tarot time.

01:43 – Tarot

Ooh, we pulled a Major Arcana card and that is Judgment in reverse. And truthfully, I'm not sure if I've ever pulled this card before. Anyway, as a reminder, Major Arcana cards indicate major changes or shifts in our lives.

Now, Judgment is toward the end of the Major Arcana, which is telling us we're coming to the end of the fool's journey. So, we've come a long way, but we still have a little further to go. It's number 20 in when we add the digits together, we get two, which is tied to duality, partnership, and choice.

And traditional depictions of this card are very reminiscent of Judgment Day with an angel in the sky blowing a horn and awakening people from the grave. Very scary, I know, but not like in the zombie way. Anyway, this card typically signifies awakening, transformation, and acceptance.

But its reversed energy is tied to self-doubt and resentment. Hmm, I'm starting to see a theme here from last episode's tarot. Anyway, this card typically shows up in reverse if we're repeating patterns without learning important lessons.

And it tends to show up when the universe is trying to invite us to something bigger that allows us to have a deeper understanding of universal themes in our lives. So, we should reflect and meditate to understand this message the universe is sending us so we know how to move forward. And while that can be scary, Judgment in reverse reminds us that the universe has our backs.

02:55 – What Was the Lavender Scare?

So, with that in mind, let's get into it. Now, just to preface, there is a lot of history involved in what we're talking about today going back to World War I and up until 2023. So obviously there's a lot of information to cover across these different eras, but some of it I'm only going to be covering at surface level.

So, I don't want that to detract from the history or seem like I'm ignoring important events, but there is a lot to go over, so I'm just going to be giving high-level summaries for some things. But after you're done listening, I definitely recommend you go read more about these events. So, with that in mind, let's talk about the Lavender Scare, which was a period during the Cold War when the U.S. investigated and fired gay and lesbian federal workers on the unsubstantiated claim that their sexuality made them a security risk.

And this era gets its name from David K. Johnson's 2004 book, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. The color lavender was already associated with homosexuality, which I may do a bonus episode on in the future. And Senator Everett Dirksen, who was involved in the congressional investigations we'll be talking about, used the term lavender lads as derogatory political slang to describe homosexual men.

03:59 – The First and Second Red Scares

But to understand the Lavender Scare better, we need to travel a little further back in time to talk about the Red Scare. According to Britannica, a Red Scare is a period of public fear and anxiety over the supposed rise of communist or socialist ideologies in a non-communist state. And this term is typically used to describe two periods in the United States.

It might surprise you to know that there were actually two periods, because most of us are more familiar with the Red Scare associated with Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, Harry Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. But the first Red Scare actually occurred from 1917 to 1920, toward the end of World War I. And for all my Anastasia fans out there, the Russian Revolution happened in 1917, which was when the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party overthrew the Tsar. During this time, there was an anti-Semitic conspiracy, which is referred to in some places as the Bolshevik Conspiracy, that claimed that a conspiracy was behind the Russian Revolution, controlled the Soviet Union and international communist movements, and had a secret plan to overthrow Western civilization.

This prompted then US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to carry out a series of raids against foreign-born individuals who were accused of anarchist, communist, and radical leftist sympathies. Unsurprisingly, these raids were considered constitutionally questionable and drew criticism from the public since they didn't produce evidence of a Bolshevik Conspiracy. And this Red Scare faded in 1920 when Palmer's prediction of a revolution on May Day didn't happen.

Then, almost 30 years later in 1947, the second Red Scare kicked off, which is the one most of us are probably familiar with. Just to set the scene, President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in April 1945, and President Harry Truman succeeded him, which impacted the relationship between the US and the Soviet Union. Apparently, Truman's administration took a harder diplomatic line, and US and Soviet diplomats disputed conflicting interpretations of agreements made between Stalin and Roosevelt.

World War II ended in September 1945, but the uneasy wartime alliance between the US and Soviet Union began to unravel. By 1948, the Soviets had installed communist government in parts of Eastern Europe that had previously been abandoned by the Red Army. And the Red Army was the military force established by the Bolshevik government during the Russian Civil War.

It became the main military force of the Soviet Union, and in 1946 it was renamed the Soviet Army. In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party took power in China, and the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. So, obviously, these events were very alarming to the United States. So much so that then-President Harry Truman signed an executive order on March 21, 1947 that required all Federal Civil Service employees to be screened for loyalty.

06:37 – Joseph McCarthy and the Cold War

And this is where Joseph McCarthy enters the scene. McCarthy was a Wisconsin attorney and served for three years as a circuit judge before he enlisted in the Marine Corps in World War II.

He was a Democrat until 1944 and then ran for the US Senate as a Republican in 1946 and won. And I'd like to quote this sentence verbatim from his Wikipedia page. Senator McCarthy's first three years in the Senate were unremarkable.

Despite this unremarkable start, he experienced a quote-unquote meteoric rise in national profile starting on February 9, 1950. That night, during a Lincoln Dinner speech to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, he claimed that he had a list of 205 employees who were Communists and had infiltrated the State Department. Now, I would like to note that this number has been contested over the years, but quite a few sources reference 205 employees. Regardless, this made headlines and McCarthy called for investigations into staff in the Department of State, the CIA, and other government agencies.

07:33 – LGBTQ+ Life Before the Lavender Scare

Now, before we go any deeper into the Red Scare and the related Lavender Scare, I want to set the scene of LGBTQ+ life leading up to this. Despite what some may say, LGBTQ+ identity is not a new phenomenon and the 1940s saw an increased public awareness of same-sex relations.

For starters, during World War II, many gay men left their hometowns to serve in the war effort and met other queer people for the first time ever during their service. After the war ended in 1945, many young Americans began moving to more urban areas, and like we talked about in the gay neighborhoods episode, cities typically create more opportunities for LGBTQ+ people. In this case, these urban areas were quite populated, which allowed queer people to form relationships and create a shared culture and identity.

Also, in 1948, biologist Alfred Kinsey of the Kinsey Scale, ever heard of it? Published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was a historical analysis that asserted that same-sex encounters among men were relatively common. Also, around this time, more Americans were engaging in premarital sex, and single motherhood and interracial relationships became more common. Now, you would think these shifts and increased awareness would create greater acceptance, right? Well, it actually led to societal anxiety surrounding the American status quo since the Cold War brought on a morality panic.

In 1947, the U.S. Park Police announced a sex perversion elimination program, which largely targeted sexual encounters between gay men in Washington, D.C. Then, in June 1948, Congress passed a law concerning so-called sexual psychopaths in Washington, D.C. While the law didn't simply define every homosexual person as a sexual psychopath, it was used within a broader system that criminalized same-sex behavior and pathologized homosexuality. So, you can see the Lavender Scare had begun in the late 40s, but it really intensified in 1950, which coincided with the Red Scare.

09:21 – The Lavender Scare Takes Shape

On February 20th, so just 11 days after McCarthy claimed that 205 government employees were communists, he spoke on the Senate floor and provided more specifics about some of these individuals.

He characterized them as unsafe risks and stated that two of the cases concerned homosexuality. Specifically, there was Case 14 who, according to McCarthy, was a known homosexual who had been ousted by the State Department but then rehired. There was also Case 62, but I couldn't find a ton of information on that.

However, in discussing these two cases, McCarthy reinforced a broader association between homosexuality, communism, mental illness, and moral corruption, portraying both as potential threats to American society. And as it related to national security, authorities considered gay federal employees to have weak moral character and to be more susceptible to blackmail. Just over a week after those remarks, Deputy Undersecretary of State John Purifoy testified before a subcommittee of the Senate Committee of Appropriations and revealed that the State Department had ousted 91 homosexual employees as security risks.

Now, back in 1946, the Appropriations Committee had expressed concern about security risks and gave the Secretary of State broad discretion to dismiss employees for the sake of national security, and the State Department had put in stricter security checks to oust homosexual employees prior to this. However, these proceedings received very little publicity until McCarthy's speeches and Purifoy's statement, and unsurprisingly, this sparked public outcry. On March 23, 1950, U.S. Senators Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska and Jay Lister Hill of Alabama formed a special subcommittee to investigate the presence of gay people in the federal government.

The investigation lasted until May, and representatives from major branches of the federal government, the military, the FBI, and the D.C. police force all testified before the committee, and Lt. Roy Blick, who was head of the Capitol's police vice squad, claimed that more than 5,000 gay people lived in D.C. and that about 3,700 were federal employees. However, there was no actual evidence or factual basis for these claims, but were widely reported by the press and bolstered the fear of gays in the government.

11:24 – McCarthyism

Also, in late March of 1950, the term McCarthyism was coined after the Senator. You've probably heard this term thrown around before, and Britannica defines it as defamation of character or reputation by means of widely publicized indiscriminate allegations, especially on the basis of unsubstantiated charges. Basically, it's a nice way of describing someone who makes reckless public accusations of treason without showing evidence.

Sound familiar? Anyway, I found some mixed results, but it seems like the consensus is saying that the term McCarthyism was coined by Herbert Block, who was a cartoonist for the Washington Post. 

11:55 – The Hoey Committee Investigations

Now going back to that special subcommittee. On June 7, 1950, the committee resolved to undertake a thorough, comprehensive investigation of, and this is a quote, the alleged employment by the departments and agencies of the government of homosexuals and other moral perverts.

From there, a second, larger investigation was assigned to the investigation subcommittee of the Senate's Committee on Expedentiaries in the Executive Departments, which was chaired by Senator Clyde Hoey and known as the Hoey Committee. McCarthy was also on the subcommittee, but he excluded himself from this investigation and instead occasionally forwarded information about suspected homosexuals.

And the Hoey Committee gathered information from federal agencies, law enforcement, judicial authorities, and the medical community. And in July and September, they held five days of executive session hearings, which were closed to the public. However, despite investigating homosexuals, the committee didn't actually hear testimony from any gay men or lesbians.

Instead, they gathered data from law enforcement and judicial authorities, with the DC Metropolitan Police Department sharing its arrest records related to homosexuality. Meanwhile, the U.S. Park Police provided what were literally called its pervert records. And this wasn't a nickname that historians came up with later, that was the government's literal terminology.

The Park Police provided two sets of these records to the Hoey Committee, one concerning government employees and another concerning everyone else. These records documented people who had been arrested or otherwise investigated for homosexual activity, and the committee used them as part of its effort to identify gay people working for the federal government. And this is particularly disturbing because investigators weren't just collecting information, but instead cross-referencing police records with government employment records to identify people who could then potentially lose their jobs.

And since the word pervert came up, that's something important to note here. Throughout these investigations and the Lavender Scare in general, homosexuals were often labeled as moral weaklings, sexual misfits, moral risks, misfits, undesirables, or people with unusual morals. And like we touched upon before, the reason for that was it helped frame homosexuals as morally questionable or unreliable, which supported the broader argument that they could be security risks.

But back to the Hoey Committee. They sent out questionnaires to police and prosecutors in 10 of the country's largest cities to survey how arrest for men seeking same-sex contact or cruising was being handled. 

14:09 – Homosexuality, Psychiatry, and Government Policy

And they also investigated the quote-unquote medical aspects of homosexuality, writing to and interviewing approximately two dozen medical authorities to determine if homosexuals could be detected through psychiatric examination, whether and how they could be cured, if they lacked the emotional stability required for government service, if they tended to seduce younger men and women, and if it would be helpful to have psychiatrists on personnel boards charged with identifying homosexuals.

Just for context, the year after this, in 1951, the American Psychiatric Association approved the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM, which was published in 1952. Prior to the Hoey Committee, homosexuality was already being pathologized by medical authorities, and the DSM's first edition officially classified homosexuality as a quote-unquote sociopathic personality disturbance, and it wasn't until 1973 that homosexuality itself was removed as a mental disorder from the DSM. However, a diagnosis for individuals experiencing distress over their sexual orientation remained until 1987, while the remaining classification of sexual orientation-related distress wasn't removed from the DSM's sexual disorder framework until 2013.

15:18 – The Hoey Committee Report and FBI Surveillance

But anyway, back to the 1950s. The government was increasing surveillance, sharing information about suspected homosexuals between agencies and police departments, and they also made it harder for people to resign without their homosexuality being recorded in their personnel files. The investigations also led to harsher court procedures and penalties for homosexuality-related arrests, which directly resulted in some federal employees being identified and fired.

After completing its investigations, the Hoey Committee published the interim report on Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government on December 15th, 1950. In it, the Hoey Committee claimed that homosexuals were, and this is a quote, not proper persons to be employed in government because they were generally unsuitable and constituted security risks. The report also argued that homosexuals lacked the emotional stability and moral fiber necessary for government service and were particularly vulnerable to blackmail because of the stigma surrounding homosexuality.

Ultimately, the committee warned that foreign agents could exploit this vulnerability to obtain confidential information, which basically framed homosexual employees as threats to national security. And in 2015, Douglas M. Charles claimed in his book Hoover's War on Gays that this report shifted the lavender scare from being strictly Republican rhetoric to bipartisan appeal. Also, that same year, in April, J. Edgar Hoover, the first director of the FBI, forwarded to the White House a list of 393 federal employees who were allegedly arrested in D.C. since 1947 on charges of sexual irregularities.

Hoover obtained this list from Lt. Roy Blick, remember him, chief of the D.C. Morals Division, and some historians consider the dissemination of this list to be the start of the FBI's Sex Deviants Program. On June 20th, 1951, Hoover greatly expanded this program by issuing a memo which established a, and this is also a quote, uniform policy for the handling of the increasing number of reports and allegations concerning present and past employees of the United States government who assertedly are sex deviants.

This expanded version of the program increased efforts to disseminate information about gays in government and have them removed from their jobs. Additionally, the FBI began to collect allegations about suspected homosexuals, index their names, combine information from different sources, investigate allegations, and maintain files that they could then disseminate to other agencies.

17:33 – Executive Order 10450

A year and a half later, on January 20th, 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower was sworn in as the 34th President of the United States.

On April 27th, 1953, he issued Executive Order 10450, which went into effect on May 27th, 1953, and the Hoey Committee Report was a key resource in the Eisenhower Administration's creation of this order. First, it revoked President Truman's Executive Order from 1947 that required all federal civil service employees to be screened for loyalty. In place of this, Executive Order 10450 charged the heads of federal agencies and the Civil Service Commission, supported by the FBI, with investigating federal employees to determine whether they pose security risks.

Specifically, every federal employee became subject to a security investigation to determine if they were compatible with national security, and these investigations could include FBI records, fingerprints, police records, former employers, supervisors, references, and schools. And employees could be suspended and ultimately terminated if the investigation suggested that someone wasn't reliable or trustworthy enough. This Executive Order also required agencies to maintain security programs and created a centralized security investigations index through the Civil Service Commission.

And Section 8 of this order said that investigations should consider any criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct or sexual perversion, which directly linked homosexuality as evidence that someone was unsuitable for federal employment. However, it didn't only say that homosexuality was immoral. Instead, the order placed homosexuality within a national security screening framework that asserted that a person's sexuality could allegedly make them vulnerable to coercion, influence, or pressure.

For example, a gay person could be blackmailed by a foreign agent because of their sexuality, which would potentially lead them to be disloyal to the United States. Essentially, Executive Order 10450 turned anti-gay discrimination in the federal government into an official national security policy, which created a legal framework for widespread exclusion and removal of LGBTQ+ people from federal employment. And this framework reinforced and expanded the FBI's existing sex deviants program.

19:38 – The Red Scare Fades, but the Lavender Scare Continues

Now, turning our attention back to the Red Scare, its turning point came in 1954. Between April and June of that year, a series of televised hearings were held by the United States Senate's Subcommittee on Investigations to investigate conflicting accusations between the Army and McCarthy. McCarthy had accused the Army of improperly protecting a suspected communist, and the Army accused McCarthy and his aides of using their investigation to pressure and intimidate the Army.

After 36 days of hearings, McCarthy's sensational interrogation tactics were exposed and discredited, which helped turn public opinion against him. That November, Republicans lost control of the Senate in the midterm elections, and McCarthy was replaced as chairman of the investigating committee, and on December 2nd, the Senate formally condemned him on a vote of 67-22 for conduct contrary to Senate traditions. After that, he was largely ignored by his colleagues and the media, and he died in 1957 before he finished his second term.

However, while the Red Scare dwindled in the years that followed, the Lavender Scare continued on. It wasn't until 1975, 22 years after Eisenhower first signed Executive Order 10450, that the Civil Service Commission reversed its ban on hiring LGBTQ+ people. In 1977, the State Department lifted its policy banning gay individuals from employment in the Foreign Service.

And while these bans were lifted, it didn't stop discriminatory hiring and firing practices against LGBTQ+ people, because there's a difference between changing policies and changing attitudes. In 1995, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12968, which repealed language in Eisenhower's order that restricted national security access based on sexual orientation and stated that, the United States government does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or sexual orientation in granting access to classified information. And in 1998, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 13087, which prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation in the federal workforce.

But it wasn't until 2017, 64 years after Executive Order 10450 was signed, that it was explicitly repealed when President Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13764, which was also the last order signed by his administration. On April 26, 2023, President Joe Biden issued a proclamation designating that April 27th as the 70th anniversary of the Lavender Scare and called upon U.S. government and citizens to honor the contributions of LGBTQ+ public servants.

22:07 – The Impact on the LGBTQ+ Community

And as you can imagine, the Lavender Scare had a profound impact on the LGBTQ+ community.

Historians estimate that anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 federal employees were fired or resigned because of their sexuality during the Lavender Scare. And this resulted in reputations severely damaged and livelihoods ruined, which even led to several documented suicides. One specific individual impacted was astronomer Frank Kameny, who was fired from his job with the Army Map Service in 1957.

However, instead of staying quiet, he appealed his termination several times and attempted to bring the case to the Supreme Court. In 1961, he co-founded the gay rights organization the Mattachine Society of Washington and was one of the first activists to link sexuality to civil rights. And in 1963, he was the first openly gay person to speak in front of Congress where he advocated for the morality of consensual homosexual activity.

And that's just a high-level summary of Kameny. He is a fascinating individual, and I definitely plan to do a full episode on him and the Mattachine Society in the future. But in the meantime, I highly recommend you read The Deviant's War by Dr. Eric Servini to learn more about him.

It's an amazing book, and I consider it to be an essential read. And while we're talking about literature, in 2007, Thomas Mallon published the novel Fellow Travelers, which is about a love affair between two men working for the federal government during the Lavender Scare. And Showtime adapted it into a miniseries in 2023 starring Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey. Woof.

23:31 – Episode Closing

So, there you have it, the Lavender Scare, something I'm sure most of us never learned about in school, but really crucial LGBTQ+ history to understand, especially in this current moment. I've said it before, but the pendulum tends to swing back and forth when it comes to LGBTQ+ acceptance.

And right now, I feel like we're living in a moment where the pendulum is swinging against us. Some of the rhetoric from the Lavender Scare really hits home for me based upon what I'm hearing today, and there have definitely been some vagrant acts of McCarthyism on display, especially when it comes to trans rights and acceptance. I mean, last year, The Washington Blade published an article stating that there were reports that the FBI was allegedly coordinating with the Heritage Foundation to consider classifying transgender people or transgender-related subjects under new quote-unquote violent extremist categories, including nihilistic violent extremists and transgender ideology-inspired violent extremism.

Sound familiar? So, it's important that we understand the past and pay attention to the present to keep history from repeating itself. And connecting it back to the tarot, Judgment in reverse, to me, this connection is pretty obvious. Again, this Major Arcana card usually shows up in reverse when we're repeating patterns without learning lessons.

And I think politically, that's definitely where we're at. Many of us didn't learn about the Lavender Scare, and today, I feel like we're hearing similar rhetoric that was spewed all those years ago. Understandably, hearing all this discourse can cause panic, anxiety, stress, self-doubt, but Judgment is inviting us to be a part of something bigger.

It wants us to take the time to reflect and understand the universal themes of our lives. And LGBTQ+ rights and acceptance are definitely a big part of our lives. So, by understanding the past and paying attention to the moment, we can be better prepared to create a better future for our community.

Advocacy can go a long way, whether it's calling up our local officials, donating to LGBTQ+ organizations, intentionally creating community, or even just having a conversation with a family member or friend to make sure they're aware of what we're dealing with politically. These are all small steps individually, but collectively as a community, this is how we create change. And while this may be a scary moment we're living in, remember that Judgment is telling us that the universe has our backs.

25:34 – Connect with A Jaded Gay

So, thank you all for listening. Hope you enjoyed this little LGBTQ+ history moment, and I'd love to hear from you. If you have any feedback or questions, you can email rob at aajadedgay.com. Also, let's keep the conversation going.

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27:05 – Outtake

And Senator Everett Dicks- oop, Dickson. Yeah, he sounds like a dick.