The Lavender Scare: The Cold War
Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in
the Federal Government by David K.
Johnson
A Fine Piece Of Scholarship On Homophobia In Government And The Early Gay Rights
Struggle
In Cold War America, Senator Joseph McCarthy enjoyed tremendous
support in the fight against what he called atheistic communism. But that
support stemmed less from his wild charges about communists than his
more substantiated charges that “sex perverts” had infiltrated government
agencies. Although now remembered as an attack on suspected disloyalty,
McCarthyism introduced “moral values” into the American political arsenal.
Warning of a spreading homosexual menace, McCarthy and his
Republican allies learned how to win votes.

Winner of three book awards, The Lavender Scare masterfully traces the
origins of contemporary sexual politics to Cold War hysteria over national
security. Drawing on newly declassified documents and interviews with
former government officials, historian David Johnson chronicles how the
myth that homosexuals threatened national security determined
government policy for decades, ruined thousands of lives, and pushed
many to suicide. As Johnson shows, this myth not only outlived McCarthy
but, by the 1960s, helped launch a new civil rights struggle.
“Fresh scholarship” —New York Times
Personal Review: The Lavender Scare: The Cold War
Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government by
David K. Johnson
This book is an excellent piece of history and well written. The author
extensively researches private correspondence involving homosexuals and
homosexual activists, newspaper reports, congressional reports and so on.
The author makes use of the records of the most extensive congressional
investigation into homosexuality among government employees, the
Senate committee chaired by Senator Clyde Hoey, records which were
closed to researchers until 2000. He also makes use of personal interviews
and other biographic records that gives a picture of what homosexual life
was like in Washington D.C from the 1940's to 1960's.
An important point the author makes is how previous historians have
usually downplayed or, more often than not, completely ignored, the
prominence of the homosexual issue during the McCarthy era. Part of the
reason for this, the author suggests, is that historians have used Senator
McCarthy's public pronouncements to provide them with a measure of the
public focus on gay people. In his initial speeches in early 1950, McCarthy
linked homosexual behavior with adherence to communist doctrines, but
then, for no clear reason, ignored the homosexual issue for the rest of his
career. Dr. Johnson shows what he says other historians have ignored,
that other politicians picked up the issue and were successful in using in it.
The Lavender Scare picked up steam in early 1950 when under-secretary
of state John Peurifoy stated before a Senate committee that 91
employees from the State Department had been fired for homosexual
activity. Pretty soon, newspaper reports indicated that while a quarter of
the letters to McCarthy's office were about communists, the other three
quarters expressed fear and anger about homosexuals employed by the
federal government. President Truman's advisors told him that the public
worried more about homosexuals in government than communists. In

particular, the state department was seen in the public mind as a haven for
homosexuals. In his syndicated column, the reactionary Westbrook Pegler
continually stressed a connection between homosexuality and the State
Department. The right wing continually tried to link liberal Democrats to
homosexuality, portraying the Roosevelt and Truman administrations as
being populated by effete, unmanly intellectuals and bureaucrats who
raised the taxes of hardworking Americans and sold out to the Soviet
Union at Yalta. There was much speculation that homosexuals had been
placed in the State Department by Sumner Welles, who had been the
number two official in Roosevelt's State Department. Welles had been
forced to quietly resign after he drunkenly propositioned several male
porters while travelling by rail with Roosevelt's entourage in 1943.
Homosexuality would be used against Charles Bohlen, who had been one
of the US architects of the Yalta accords, in guilt by association way in
1953, during his confirmation hearings to be ambassador to the Soviet
Union. Bohlen was not gay but had a friendship with a gay State
Department official named Charles Bohlen. Bohlen got the
ambassadorship but his friend lost his job.
The official justification for firing homosexuals was 1) a foreign power,
mainly the Soviets, could lure homosexuals in sensitive government posts
into compromising positions and blackmail them into being spies 2)
homosexuals demoralized fellow government employees with their
"abnormal" behavior. The spying/blackmail issue was that which was most
prominently played up. The Soviets were trying to lure female government
employees into lesbianism so they could blackmail them into being spies,
Senator Kenneth Wherry claimed. Dr. Johnson shows that during the Hoey
Committee hearings, Senators looked for statements from medical experts
that would substantiate their belief that homosexuals had weaker moral
fibers, a greater vulnerability to becoming spies than heterosexual folks.
The medical officials responded that no evidence existed for these claims
but the committee ignored them. The Committee seized on the claim of
the director of the CIA that, in the early 20th century, the chief of Austrian
intelligence had been caught in a homosexual act by Czarist Russian
agents and, in return for not making evidence of the homosexuality public,
forced him to become a Russian spy. Johnson argues that, in reality, while
this intelligence chief may have been gay, there was no evidence that he
became a spy because the Russians threatened to use his gayness
against him. Homosexuality was again cited as a cause for the defection
to the Soviet Union of two NSA analysts in 1960. The lead NSA analyst
seemed to have been gay but no evidence exists that the Russians used
his homosexuality to blackmail him.
Homosexuality ranked as a very prominent "security risk" in the eyes of
government officials. In 1953, State Department official Carlisle
Hummelsine told congress that of the 654 dismissals or forced
resignations of employees on "loyalty" or security grounds in the
Department since 1947, 402 were because of homosexual behavior.
Especially after Eisenhower became president in 1953, security specialists

swarmed over all government agencies, using gossip from informers or
background checks, to bully alleged homosexual government employees
into resigning. The standard of the federal government was that even one
homosexual experience in an adult's life, no matter how far in the distant
past, automatically disqualified one for government employment. The
number of people fired or whose application for employment in the federal
government was rejected on the grounds of homosexuality, ran into the
thousands. Many were subsequently blacklisted from gainful employment.
A handful of people have been documented to subsequently have
committed suicide, though this number is probably much higher.
The Lavender Scare is held by Dr. Johnson, I think quite plausibly, to have
started the Gay Rights movement. It was not the Stonewall Riots of 1969
as is commonly believed. Frank Kameny, who had been fired as an
astronomer with the navy (at the dawn of the space race) in 1957 for being
gay, helped build on tentative gay organizational efforts in the 1950's.
Kameny's organization The Mattachine Society of Washington gained
national attention with a series of pickets before federal government
offices, including the White House, in 1965. Kameny helped start legal
challenges against the federal government's discrimination against gay
people.
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