We cannot understand the Red Scare unless we also understand the Lavender Scare. Much of the extension and strengthening of the national loyalty/security system in this period, I argue, was motivated as much by the perceived need to ferret out homosexuals from the government as it was by the pressure to remove communists. Many people believed that the two groups were working together to undermine the government.
And both groups were considered immoral and godless. Both groups were thought to recruit to their ranks the psychologically weak or disturbed. Both groups were perceived as hidden subcultures with their own meeting places, literature, cultural codes, and bonds of loyalty.
In popular discourse, communists and homosexuals were often conflated. Johnson: The Lavender Scare helped fan the flames of the Red Scare. How were the efforts to root out communists on the one hand and homosexuals on the other related? Question: Your title The Lavender Scare evokes the much better known Red Scare. Their arrest records were forwarded to the executive agencies and hundreds began losing their jobs. With the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his charges that communists and homosexuals had infiltrated the federal government, the men arrested in Washington's parks on sex charges seemed to threaten not just the morality of the city but the national security. Park Police initiated a "Pervert Elimination Campaign" for D.C.
Congress responded by passing a tough sexual psychopath law for the District of Columbia to crack down on deviant behavior. Publication of the Kinsey report fed these fears, particularly Kinsey's statistics that suggested widespread homosexual behavior. The memoirs of gay civil servants from the period describe a work environment within federal agencies that turned a blind eye toward employees' private lives.īut after the war a concern began to grow throughout the nation that American morality was in a state of decline. World War II accelerated the urbanization-thousands of servicemen and women streamed through the city, fostering an "anything goes" mentality. Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, was a well-known cruising area for gay men. This created an urban environment that allowed a gay and lesbian subculture to flourish. was being called "America's Number One Boom Town." Roosevelt's New Deal agencies drew thousands of young men and women to the city looking for work, especially clerical and administrative jobs. The city was growing rapidly, thousands of jobs were being created in the federal government, and gay men and women were taking advantage of these opportunities. offered a fairly benign, if not hospitable, environment for gays and lesbians to live and work. Question: From the 1930s to the end of the Second World War, Washington D.C. Author of The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government