Re: How LGBT Civil Servants Became Public Enemy No. 1 in the 1950s

In article <[email protected]>
<[email protected]> wrote:
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> Very happy to see Swallwell fail after his immature ignorant behavior with a Chink whore spy.
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> Monkey Pox, right on time to give Democrats an excuse to cheat in the next election.

During the 1950s, the State Department began to scrutinize 
public servants in its ranks, methodically scanning personnel 
files and interviewing suspected threats. The goal was to root 
out “immoral,” “scandalous” and “dangerous” government 
employees—people whose personal conduct put the entire nation at 
risk.

You might think the targets were suspected Communists—after all, 
it was the height of the Red Scare and Cold War paranoia. But 
the State Department’s targets weren’t suspected Communists, and 
the sweep wasn’t run by Joseph McCarthy. Instead, LGBT people 
were in the crosshairs, accused of unfitness to serve. Condemned 
as “perverts” and bullied out of their jobs, they were 
systematically targeted for their sexual orientation.

The period—considered as targeted and as widespread as the 
concurrent Red Scare—is now known as the Lavender Scare. Between 
the late 1940s and early 1960s, an unknown number of LGBT 
employees, likely in the thousands, were driven out of their 
jobs. Countless others were interrogated and bullied—all in an 
attempt to purge State of LGBT people.

Historian David K. Johnson gave the period a name in his book, 
The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and 
Lesbians in the Federal Government. Johnson documents the use of 
the phrase “lavender lads” to refer to gay men. It was used by 
tabloids like Confidential and people like Senator Everett 
Dirksen, who was involved in public hearings related to the 
Senate purge, and it represented a wider societal tendency to 
mock and fear LGBT people.

At the time, homosexuality was a crime, and gay people had long 
hidden their sexualities. After World War II, as cities grew, 
underground gay cultures began to flourish. Despite the 
prevailing view of homosexuality as a mental illness and a sign 
of perversion or criminality, gay people started to find one 
another at underground bars and clubs. In the meantime, American 
culture became more sexually conservative even as more and more 
people became aware of homosexuality. This provoked a backlash, 
and cities began to more aggressively police sexual expression.

Executive Order 10450
Section 8 of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1953 Executive 
Order #10450, “Security Requirements for Government Employment,” 
where it states that “sexual perversion” could be used as a fair 
reason to terminate someone’s job. At the time, homosexuality 
was considered a “sexual perversion”. (Credit: The National 
Archives)

So did the State Department. As the federal government began to 
persecute suspected Communists, gay people found themselves 
being targeted. At the time, many people equated Communism with 
homosexuality—people like Senator Joseph McCarthy, who linked 
what he considered to be the madness of Communists to the 
supposed mental imbalances of gay people.

“Many assumptions about Communists mirrored common beliefs about 
homosexuals,” notes National Archives archivist Judith Adkins. 
“Both were thought to be morally weak or psychologically 
disturbed, both were seen as godless, both purportedly 
undermined the traditional family, both were assumed to recruit, 
and both were shadowy figures with a secret subculture.”

In an attempt to lock down national security, the State 
Department began to actively seek out homosexual employees. As 
Congressional hearings about supposed homosexual activity within 
the department raged, the intelligence community began 
interviewing and pressuring for the resignations of suspected 
gay employees. Investigators looked for supposed signs of 
homosexuality, like being unmarried, and scrutinized employees’ 
and potential hires’ voices, mannerisms and dress for 
stereotypical markers that they might be gay.

“The official rationale wasn’t that homosexuals were Communists, 
but that they could be used by Communists,” Johnson told The 
University of Chicago in 2004. “A variation on the blackmail 
rationale…held that Communists promoted “sex perversion” among 
American youth as a way to weaken the country and clear the path 
for a Communist takeover.”

As the search for gay State Department employees intensified, so 
did the pressure. People were questioned, publicly humiliated 
and mocked by investigators. They were encouraged to denounce 
others and report suspected homosexuals. And in 1953, President 
Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which defined a laundry 
list of characteristics as security risks, including “sexual 
perversion.” This was interpreted as a ban on homosexual 
employees, and even more firings took place. Publicly humiliated 
and devastated by the loss of their income and their 
reputations, some even killed themselves.

Others, like Frank Kameny, fought back. Fired in 1957, he 
petitioned the Supreme Court for relief in recognition of his 
civil rights. They declined to take the case, so he picketed the 
White House. He fought to counter workplace discrimination for 
the rest of his life. Kameny wasn’t the only person galvanized 
by the public targeting of LGBT people—in 1969, the Stonewall 
Riots made gay rights a front-page issue, and the movement 
Kameny helped start and the Lavender Scare helped foment has 
flourished ever since.

The scare lasted until the 1960s, when investigations slowed. 
Only in the 1970s was the ban on gay intelligence community 
members relaxed, and it took until 1995 for another executive 
order, signed by President Bill Clinton, to explicitly state 
that the government may not discriminate based on sexual 
orientation when it comes to granting access to classified 
information. By then, countless gay people had been reminded for 
years that their participation in the State Department was not 
wanted—and that they would be treated as second-class citizens 
if they tried to serve their country.

Shortly before leaving office, Secretary of State John Kerry 
made a public apology on behalf of the State Department for the 
persecution of LGBT employees. “These actions were wrong then, 
just as they would be wrong today,” he said. The apology has 
since been removed from the State Department’s website—a 
reminder that struggles over LGBT rights are anything but relics 
of the past.

Today, memories of the Lavender Scare are fading as the people 
it targeted grow older. The experiences of others, who never 
told their stories for fear of being kicked out of their jobs, 
too, will never be known.

Homosexuals are a cancer in any society.  Cure the cancer, get 
rid of them.

https://www.history.com/news/state-department-gay-employees-
outed-fired-lavender-scare