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Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, young people flocked to Washington to work for one of the New Deal agencies or to support the war effort-among them gay and lesbian Americans.
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and the relative acceptance members of this community enjoyed in the nation’s capital. The Lavender Scare was, in part, a reaction to the growing gay subculture in D.C. Johnson estimates between 5,000 and 10,000 people were fired or resigned during the Lavender Scare. In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower signed an executive order that barred homosexuals from working for the government or government contractors. The Lavender Scare sparked multiple Congressional investigations, and though McCarthy’s prominence would be short-lived, the impacts of the scandal would continue for years.
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In the late 1940s, the State Department adopted a new policy for screening loyalty and security risks, which classified a series of behaviors, including homosexuality, as grounds for dismissal. It brought the Lavender Scare out into the open, but anti-gay purges in the State Department had in fact begun, quietly, years earlier. The Peurifoy revelation set off a frenzy of media coverage, calls for Congressional investigation and public fear about slipping morals in the United States. In defense of the State Department, the head of its security program, John Peurifoy, denied there were communists at the agency, but he announced that State had fired some 200 employees deemed “security risks,” 91 of whom were gay. When pressed for evidence in Congress, he testified for hours and noted specific cases, including two that involved gay men. McCarthy, in his 1950 Wheeling West Virginia speech, famously claimed to have evidence of 205 card-carrying communists in the State Department. Officials saw homosexuality as a psychological defect and used phrases like sex perverts and sexual deviants to label their crusade against gays in the federal government. officials claimed that homosexuals were “security risks” because foreign governments could use their sexual orientation as blackmail. Motivated by the same post-war anxieties as the Red Scare, McCarthy and other U.S. Johnson, a historian, has written the definitive history of the Lavender Scare, chronicling its origins and it impacts. But what has been largely missing from history textbooks is the story of the Lavender Scare, an effort spanning three decades to rid the federal government of homosexuals. Most are familiar with the Red Scare-Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against communists in the State Department. Meanwhile, in Congress, a Senator from Wisconsin was making waves with accusations about subversives in the State Department.
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In 1950, Kameny was pursuing a doctorate degree in astronomy at Harvard. The government, however, surely had no idea that firing Kameny would take a Harvard-educated astronomer and turn him into one of the early, unrelenting leaders in the fight for gay rights. In 1957, he lost his job as a civil servant thanks to a policy that justified firing employees for “sexual perversion,” which encompassed homosexuality. Kameny would spend months corresponding with this man and his superiors trying to fight the dishonorable discharge. Threatened with a dishonorable discharge and even time in the brig, the man wrote to the Mattachine Society seeking help, not wanting to face discipline for "being the way I am." “I hope you can help me,” one Marine Corps private wrote in early 1969, “I told my commanding officer that I am gay.” Kameny, as president of the Mattachine Society of Washington, an early gay rights organization, fielded letters, offered advice and helped workers appeal their dismissals or mount a legal challenge. They wrote to him seeking help after having been interrogated or fired, denied a security clearance or threatened with dishonorable discharge. (Photo by Kay Tobin, courtesy New York Public Library Digital Collections)īy the late 1960s, Frank Kameny was receiving regular letters from men and women around the country, all employed in the federal civil service or the United States military. Organzing public protests was one of many steps Kameny took to fight for the rights of LGBT Americans. Frank Kameny marches during a protest outside Independence Hall in 1965.