Every other Tuesday, the team behind Civics 101 joins NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa to talk about how our democratic institutions actually work.
During the Cold War, as the anticommunist movement, the Red Scare, raged on, so did another moral panic known as the Lavender Scare. This was a time when the federal government persecuted and fired thousands of LGBTQ employees.
Civics 101 host Hannah McCarthy joins us this week to talk about Lavender Scare, how it happened, the activists that pushed for its end, and its legacy today.
Transcript
How was the Lavender Scare justified? What was their case?
I feel like justification is a really loose term when we're talking about the mass ousting of a group of people, because the reasoning is almost necessarily pretext. But what the government was saying was that LGBTQ people—they would have used the term homosexual people—were susceptible to blackmail. Why is that? Every state in the nation at this point had a law that essentially criminalized homosexuality. The government said that this criminalization meant that those individuals could be blackmailed by communists and coerced into giving up government secrets. So that's the case that they were making.
How many people lost their jobs because of this?
The State Department has admitted to firing 1,400 people suspected to be “homosexuals.” But historians estimate that the full tally of people fired from the federal government is between 5,000 and 10,000. And it's not just the loss of that job, right? It's the loss of a career.
Then there's this social fallout. Your government has just labeled you as a “homosexual.” That means that they have labeled you as a pervert. This is the term the government used. These individuals were considered dangerous, untrustworthy people. The demonization of this community, this is a nationwide thing. It is dangerous on so many levels to be publicly labeled in this way.
So Hannah, how did the Lavender Scare end?
This is a good time to talk about someone named Frank Kameny. He was an astronomer for the Army Maps Service. And early on in the Lavender Scare, Frank is fired for having conducted “illegal sexual activity.” And he fights it. He appeals this firing. And at every single level, the government denies him.
So Frank goes the activism route. He starts something called the Mattachine Society. This is an early national gay rights organization. And to be clear, Julia, this is ground breaking. For LGBTQ people to gather in public and protest as LGBTQ people was an incredible risk, and it was pretty much unprecedented in this country.
And eventually this community started getting their cases into the federal court system, and they started winning. And now they were not winning based on discrimination claims. It was the court saying, essentially, you cannot prove that being “homosexual” has in any way impacted the job performance of these individuals or their ability to conduct themselves ethically. And eventually, because of this, the Civil Service Commission finally ends the ban on homosexuals in government jobs.
What about today? What were the reverberations of that period of time?
So despite the legal and organizational gains made following the Lavender Scare, this notion of the LGBTQ community as a threat to American morals and American safety very much remained in the air. It's a tacit condoning of discrimination of LGBTQ people, which, of course, does not stop this community from organizing and asserting their rights and going to court and protesting and showing up.
And there is no federal law that explicitly prohibits discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity anywhere but in employment. The Equality Act bill sought to do this, but it died in the Senate multiple times. So basically, the push for broader protections for the LGBTQ community continues to this day.