You've probably heard about the Red Scare - the panic around the perceived threat of communism during the Cold War. But the Lavender Scare is lesser known. This was a time when the federal government investigated, persecuted and fired thousands of LGBTQ+ employees, calling them security risks and threats to the country.
In this episode of Civics 101, we dive into the origin and timeline of the Lavender Scare, and meet the man who pushed back, and in doing so, started a movement. We also talk about the ripple effects we're still seeing today, with Dr. Lillian Faderman, author of Woman: The American History of an Idea, and David K. Johnson, author of The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government, which became the basis for a documentary film that was broadcast nationwide on PBS.
Transcript:
Note: The following transcript was AI-generated and may contain errors.
Hannah McCarthy: Just a quick note. This episode includes outdated language that is offensive. Hey, Nick. Can you describe for our listeners the video that I'm showing you right now?
Nick Capodice: Yeah. So you've got people picketing in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. And they look like sort of clean-cut people. They're well groomed. And they also have signs, signs that say things like sexual preference is irrelevant to employment. And homosexual citizens want equal treatment as human beings. But it's kind of eerie. And because nobody's saying anything, there's no chanting. There's no yelling.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, this is a silent protest. The group protesting is part of the Mattachine Society. The founder and leader of the silent protest is that guy wearing the suit and the tie with the pocket square. Talking to a reporter. That's Frank Kameny.
Archive: I have lived for eight months on $0.20 worth of food a day when I had the 27th. This is at a time when people in my profession were in higher demand than they had been in all of human history. And I could not get a job specifically because I was a felon.
Dr. Lillian Faderman: Frank Kameny was very rare in his fighting back against the federal government and his being fired from his job. What usually happened when a homosexual, as we were all called, was fired from his job or her job is that that person would sort of slink off into silence and hope that nobody would find out help, that it could be kept as quiet as possible. Frank Kameny refused to be quiet, and on top of his refusing to be quiet himself, he encouraged other homosexuals to protest their firing.
Archive: And I am not alone. I know many people who have done the same. I see careers ruined, lives destroyed for no other reason. These were people with a great deal to offer to society simply because society is prejudiced against them and will not allow them equality of opportunity.
Hannah McCarthy: This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: And today we are talking about something called the Lavender Scare. This was a time when the federal government investigated, persecuted and fired thousands of LGBTQ+ employees, calling them security risks and threats to the country.
Archive: American. Beatniks, homosexuals that time.
Hannah McCarthy: But this moral panic had the unintended effect of fueling the gay rights movement, and it paved the way for federal protections for LGBTQ+ employees.
Dr. Lillian Faderman: Lavender Scare actually began in the late 1940s.
Hannah McCarthy: This is Dr. Lillian Federman.
Dr. Lillian Faderman: I'm a historian. I'm most interested in lesbian history, women's history, and LGBTQ history.
Hannah McCarthy: Her latest book was published in 2022. It's called Women The American History of an Idea.
Dr. Lillian Faderman: The Red Scare. It was a period of paranoia when witch hunting of so-called communists began.
Archive: The world is divided into two factions. On the one side, the forces of freedom. On the other, the forces of communism. In recognizing a communist, physical appearance counts for nothing. If he openly declares himself to be a communist, we take his word for it. But there are other communists who don't show their real faces, who work more silently.
Dr. Lillian Faderman: And eventually it leapt over into witch hunting of homosexuals, as we were all called at that time. Whether we were lesbian or gay or bisexual or trans, which was not a term at that time, transgender. And these same kind of witch hunting that was applied to suspected communists was also applied to suspected homosexuals, first on the federal level and then in various states, and then among private employers as well.
Nick Capodice: Okay, So we've mentioned the Red Scare before on the show. That was the hysteria that happened during the Cold War around fears of communism spreading in the United States. So red and red scare, that refers to the color of the Soviet flag and communist allegiance. But what's the meaning behind the lavender scare?
Prof. David Johnson: Well, it wasn't called that at the time. It's a term historians have used since, only starting in the in the nineties, when people like myself and other historians started looking at the phenomenon.
Hannah McCarthy: This is David Johnson. He wrote the definitive book on the Lavender Scare, and there's a 2017 PBS documentary based on this book.
Prof. David Johnson: But Lavender has has long been associated with homosexuality. There are different theories about why that is. Some link it back to as far back as the ancient Greeks. That's that the lesbian poet Sappho associated violet with homosexuality. The other explanation is that lavender is a mixture of colors. It's red and blue or pink and blue. So it's like male/female colors. And homosexuality is often associated with with some sort of gender inversion. But it was fairly widely known in the fifties that lavender they talked about the lavender lands in the State Department. The Cold War is seen as a as a moral crusade, right. Against atheistic communism. That's an attack on the family. And gay people, of course, are also seen as immoral and an anti family. There's that sort of moral connection in the popular imagination. They're also both seen as as psychologically disturbed. Mccarthy talks about anyone who's attracted to communism. There must be something wrong with him. They must be mentally twisted in some way.
Hannah McCarthy: Senator Joseph McCarthy played a big role in this moral crusade. We're going to talk more about Joseph McCarthy in a bit. But this attitude wasn't coming out of left field. Bigotry had permeated almost every facet of American society. If someone was not white, Protestant, part of a nuclear family, middle to upper class or straight, then they were viewed as the other and faced all kinds of discrimination. Here's Dr. Lillian Federman again.
Dr. Lillian Faderman: The LGBTQ community really suffered great threats and great discrimination to the churches. Without exception, virtually, we were all sinners to the medical health profession. We were all crazies. Until 1973, homosexuality was considered a mental disorder and was in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which was virtually the Bible of mental health professionals.
Hannah McCarthy: Licensed doctors tried to, quote, cure patients with everything from electroshock therapy to lobotomies. The stakes were just that high. So people lived double lives. They didn't want to risk the exposure.
Dr. Lillian Faderman: To the federal government. We were all subversives. We were open to blackmail, and we would give away federal secrets. And we weren't loyal to this country because of that.
Nick Capodice: So the government justified the persecution of gay federal employees because Russians or communists could blackmail them. Is that where this is headed?
Hannah McCarthy: That was the idea. That was the crux of the government's argument.
Dr. Lillian Faderman: If you were a homosexual, it was against the law in every single State of the Union, and you would be susceptible to blackmail by the Reds and you would give away the secrets of the federal government. This was true even if they were secretaries working in a federal job or truck drivers working for the federal government, they were still considered threats to the safety of the country, which was nonsense. Of course, there was never any evidence that a homosexual was blackmailed into giving up the federal secrets.
Hannah McCarthy: And here's where we come back to Joseph McCarthy. He was a Republican senator from Wisconsin who had been flying under the radar after taking office in 1946. But then he gave a speech that put him right in the national spotlight.
Prof. David Johnson: This kind of rise to power is when he makes a claim. At a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950, he has a list of 205 card carrying communists currently working in the State Department with the knowledge of the secretary of state.
Archive: The president's own loyalty board found 284 unfit for service. He said, We only discharge 79 and we at that time called upon the president, the Secretary of State, to tell us who the 205 were and why they were kept on.
Prof. David Johnson: That captures the media attention they want. They want to see the list and they want to know who's on this list.
Nick Capodice: Was there any truth in McCarthy's claims?
Hannah McCarthy: Not according to the person actually in charge of the State Department at the time.
Prof. David Johnson: The secretary of state, Dean Acheson, is asked about this. He says, oh, no, no. Communists here in the State Department have been fired and they haven't found any. It's all good. Nothing to see here.
Hannah McCarthy: Now, in the meantime, the press was also pushing Joseph McCarthy to give more details about the 205 people on the list.
Archive: How do you still maintain, in view of what you've learned since that there are 205 or any similar number of communists working in the State Department today? Let's get our figures straight.
Hannah McCarthy: But McCarthy's claims kept shifting.
Archive: Unfortunately, I cannot get the names, but I do have in my hand the names of 57 individuals who were either communists were certainly loyal to the Communist Party.
Prof. David Johnson: First there's 205, then there's 87, later there's 57. And first they're card carrying communists, and then later they're loyalty risks or security risks. The language keeps changing.
Hannah McCarthy: A week after McCarthy's speech in Wheeling. Secretary of State Acheson attended a hearing on Capitol Hill. He was officially there to talk about the budget, but a senior senator from New Hampshire named Styles Bridges started asking questions mainly about security risks. These questions led Acheson to eventually reveal some things.
Prof. David Johnson: He admits that while we have fired 202 people we consider to be security risks. And then his aide finally admits, Well, and almost half of those 91 of them were homosexuals. And it's that revelation really that sets off the lavender scare. The reaction could have been, Oh, great, you know, you found these people and you got rid of them, you know? Right. But that's not how a moral panic works. People were like, well, where did those 91 go? Did they did they go to other government agencies? And how many of these homosexuals are working in the Department of Commerce? And and and why were they hired to begin with in the State Department? So it seems to corroborate McCarthy's otherwise groundless charges.
Nick Capodice: So, in other words, because neither government officials nor the public were satisfied with the firings, because these potential threats may still be in the government, McCarthy's seemed all the more justified in his hunt. So what did the government do? You had the public up in arms. There is a so called moral panic. I imagine the newspapers are having a field day with this covering like mad. How does the government respond?
Hannah McCarthy: The response came from the House of Representatives in the form of a series of congressional investigations.
Nick Capodice: Well, the Red Scare was known for its congressional investigations.
Hannah McCarthy: Yes, perhaps best known for those conducted by the House un-American Activities Committee or who back.
Archive: The growing menace of communism arouses the House of Representatives un-American Activities Committee. Among the well-informed witnesses testifying is J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mr. Hoover speaks with authority on the subject. The Communist Party of the United States is a fifth column, if there ever was one. It is far better organized than were the Nazis in occupied countries prior to their capitulation.
Hannah McCarthy: Who act was created in 1938 as a special committee of the US House of Representatives. Its primary mission was to look into fascist and communist activity in the United States, and this committee used some fairly ruthless tactics. If a witness didn't comply or answer questions, they could be found in contempt of Congress and sent to jail. People who are asked to testify before, who act often refused, taking the Fifth Amendment and staying silent, which is a constitutional right, by the way. But this was often looked upon as an admission of guilt.
Archive: What do you mean by that? Are you now a member of the committee? You like to come to the ballot box when I vote and take out the ballot and see, Mr. Chairman, I respectfully suggest the witness be directed to answer the question. You are directed to answer the question. I invoke the Fifth Amendment and forget it. I respectfully suggest the witness be directed to answer the question whether if he gave us a truthful answer, he would be supplying information which might be used against him in a criminal proceeding.
Hannah McCarthy: And taking the Fifth didn't stop their careers or reputations from being left in tatters. Hundreds of people were jailed, thousands were fired and blacklisted, which, by the way, it means a person's name was put on a list of names of people who should not be hired. And there are a lot of well-known people who were affected by this. Lucille Ball, W.E.B. Dubois, Albert Einstein. That's just a few of them. So in 1950, the Senate passed a resolution asking its committee on expenditures to look into how many and this is the actual quote. Homosexuals or other sex perverts worked for the federal government.
Nick Capodice: Wow.
Hannah McCarthy: I should note that although McCarthy is the senator who kicked off the Lavender scare at that point, he kind of took a back seat. He was on the committees, but a whole new set of lawmakers stepped into the limelight to demand a, quote, pervert purge. And this was not new and neither was the idea of targeting LGBTQ+ individuals. In 1947, the US Park Police had what was called the, quote, sex perversion elimination campaign. Men were arrested if they seemed suspicious and their personal information was put in a. And again, this is a real quote pervert file.
Archive: This 19 year old service man left his girlfriend on the beach to go to a men's room in a park nearby where he knew that he could find a homosexual contact. The men's room was under a police surveillance. Anybody going to hear about this? My parents. Your parents don't know of this, but your community commander will probably find out about.
Nick Capodice: All right. Let me recap this timeline real quick. World War Two is over. Americans are scared of Russia. There's a suspicion of communists working in the government. Mccarthy says he has a list of communists in the government. The connection to gay government workers is made. And this leads to the Senate responding by creating a resolution to look into, quote, employment of homosexuals and other sex perverts in the government. And then these Lavender Scare hearings began. So what happened?
Prof. David Johnson: They call in witnesses. They call in police officers, vice officers, government security officials, the head of the CIA, which is then a newly formed organization. And ask all of them, are gay people a threat to national security or are they vulnerable to blackmail? And they all say absolutely, yes, yes, yes, yes. They're capable, are vulnerable to blackmail and therefore a threat to national security.
Nick Capodice: Really? Was there any pushback to that claim?
Hannah McCarthy: Well, the chief counsel of the investigation, his name was Francis Flanagan. He did ask for evidence.
Prof. David Johnson: Do you have any proof of this? Do you have. Can you give us an example? And nobody could. They couldn't give any examples. They would occasionally give an example of of a gay person who had been blackmailed in terms of money, asking for money. And then the gay person would go to the police and the police would capture the blackmailer and charge them because that's illegal. Blackmail is illegal. And they would use that as evidence that gay people were vulnerable to blackmail when in fact, it's really evidence that they're not vulnerable to buy. Right. Because they did not fall victim to the blackmail scheme.
Hannah McCarthy: To be clear, during these congressional investigations, evidence was not uncovered that gay federal employees were vulnerable to blackmail. And that did not stop with federal government employees.
Prof. David Johnson: They don't have an example of a single American citizen, gay citizen who has under threat of blackmail, has revealed state secrets. And despite the lack of evidence, the main committee, the WHO committee, publishes a report that says definitively that gay people are vulnerable to blackmail. They're a threat to national security. It now has the imprimatur of the of the US Congress on it, and it seems to be fact.
Hannah McCarthy: David Johnson pointed out that even though the congressional investigations were started by McCarthy and other Republicans, they ended up being a truly bipartisan effort.
Prof. David Johnson: No one no one is standing up and saying this is wrong, that gay people should be able to serve their government. No one is saying that.
Hannah McCarthy: The politics of the Lavender Ccare were not limited to Congress. This period played a big role in the presidential election of 1952.
Prof. David Johnson: And the Republican campaign slogan that year was Eisenhower and Nixon. As the two presidential and vice presidential running mates, their slogan is Let's clean house. Let's get rid of all of these bad people in Washington. Communists, homosexuals. Get them out of Washington. Let's clean house. And because they win hugely in 1952 against Adlai Stevenson, who is effectively gay.
Nick Capodice: Baited, David just said gay baited. Can you explain what gay baiting is?
Hannah McCarthy: It's basically a political tactic where there's an implication that a rival might be gay without providing any proof. There are codes that are used to kind of skirt around it. It's never said outright. Adlai Stevenson was the Democratic nominee for president for the second time.
Prof. David Johnson: He's considered somewhat of an intellectual egghead. He's a former State Department official and he was divorced. And the Republicans made a lot about his divorce and why was he divorced? There were sort of rumors about that. Maybe it was because he was he was gay. Apparently, the FBI even spread rumors that he had been arrested on a on a morals charge, on a on a sex charge.
Nick Capodice: The FBI was getting involved. Why would that even happen?
Hannah McCarthy: Well, the FBI was headed by J. Edgar Hoover.
Nick Capodice: Okay.
Hannah McCarthy: He was a conservative guy and he used his power to meddle in elections. Now, one outcome of this that you might not expect is that this homophobia being weaponized in politics led to something that we now see all the time.
Prof. David Johnson: Eisenhower and Nixon campaigned almost all the time with their wives and sometimes even with their children. And the campaign literature emphasized that they were family men and had pictures of them with their beautiful wives and children, or in the cases of the Eisenhower's, they had to trot out their grandchildren. To make a contrast with Stevenson, who had no wife, and therefore there would be if he were elected, there would be no first lady.
Archive: Both Pat and I have considered it a privilege to talk, to travel over America, to talk many, many times a day, and to work for your election as president of the United States.
Hannah McCarthy: Dwight Eisenhower wins big, and one of the first things he did in office in 1953 was Pass Executive Order 10450 titled Security Requirements for Government Employment.
Prof. David Johnson: Which sets up this new security system in the federal government and a whole list of reasons for excluding people from the civil service. And one of them is sexual perversion, which is perceived as as homosexuality. And that remains in effect from 1953 until 1975. So every civil servant under the Eisenhower security program is subject to an investigation. This new security system puts everyone under the gun of this this investigative apparatus.
Hannah McCarthy: And we will hear more about that investigative apparatus and the man who fought against it after the break.
Nick Capodice: But first, there is all sorts of stuff that we cannot include in our episodes because of time that ends up on the cutting room floor. And if you want to know what that stuff is, you should subscribe to our newsletter. It's called Extra Credit. It comes out every two weeks. It's free, and you can sign up at our website, civics101podcast.org. There also, we have links to our weekly Civics 101 quiz and a Wordle. So check it out.
Hannah McCarthy: We're back and we're talking about the Lavender Scare. This was the persecution of LGBTQ+ federal employees by the US government during and in the wake of the McCarthy era.
Nick Capodice: All right, Hannah, you said that Eisenhower issued this executive order 10450, which directed the heads of federal agencies and the Civil Service Commission to look into federal employees to see if they were security risks. And this is what really kicked things into high gear.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, it did. Government agencies, especially the State Department, immediately ramped up their efforts. They made relationships with other intelligence agencies and worked with local law enforcement to cross-reference their files. They got help with background checks, and they were notified when NSA employees were arrested or charged with wrongdoing. Every government employee had to pass some sort of clearance. In the CIA, it was polygraph tests.
Prof. David Johnson: They would investigate a government employee. They would interview their family, roommates, friends, former professors, coworkers. And if they found any sort of suspicious activity, if they found that they knew other people that the government had identified as known homosexuals, they would be under suspicion if they had been reported to be at gay bars, which were being monitored by the government. You know, that would be a clue. Even if they were if their dress and self presentation were slightly non-conforming. Right. Women were slightly butch or men were slightly effeminate in their you know, in their walk or the kind of clothes they wore. That would set up red flags.
Hannah McCarthy: And when a red flag was raised, like if a fellow employee or manager thought they saw something that was, quote, suspicious, that would lead to a deeper investigation and eventually an interrogation of the suspect.
Prof. David Johnson: So you would be called in by civil service investigators to a room. You'd have to swear an oath. You weren't allowed to see an attorney or have an attorney present. And usually the first question was the Civil Service Commission has information that you are a homosexual. What comment do you care to make? And confronted with that most gay and lesbian civil servants, they would refuse to answer. But then they would ask more questions. Do you know Kate Smith? Do you know John Doe? Do you know these people who the government knew to be known? Homosexuals? Have you ever been to the Redskins lounge? Have you ever been to the Chicken Hut, which were known known gay bars in Washington at the time? And. Most people, when confronted with these kinds of interrogations, they would confess to something small just to kind of satisfy the interrogators. And that would usually be enough. Confessing to being at a gay bar, confessing to knowing other gay people.
Hannah McCarthy: And when someone confessed to something they were asked about, even if it was not true, they were fired, were forced to resign.
Dr. Lillian Faderman: And if you were fired from a job for homosexuality, it was virtually impossible to get another one. And this was true not only if you worked for the federal government, but it really it filtered down into all aspects of employment.
Hannah McCarthy: I think, to better describe the fallout from these investigations. It's a good idea to bring back the person we introduced you to at the very beginning of this episode, the person leading that silent protest, Frank Kameny.
Nick Capodice: This is the guy wearing the suit with the pocket square.
Hannah McCarthy: That's right. He was an astronomer who had studied at Harvard, a super brilliant guy.
Prof. David Johnson: Right at the beginning of the space race with the Soviet Union, when the United States needs astronomers. Government hires Frank Kameny. He's working for the Army Map service. He's helping the Army create accurate maps of the globe, particularly the Soviet Union, where we're aiming our ICBM nuclear missiles.
Dr. Lillian Faderman: But fairly early on, they did a background check, and it was discovered that he was once arrested, accused of illegal sexual activity in San Francisco, and he was fired.
Prof. David Johnson: Frank is a you know, he's a nerdy scientist. He doesn't understand why the government is interested in his sex life. You know, as a scientist, he thinks rationally and about facts. And he knows this has nothing to do with his ability to do his job. And so he kind of thinks it's a mistake. He doesn't know about this whole lavender scare that it started in 1950 and knows nothing about it. So he fights it.
Nick Capodice: How did he fight it?
Hannah McCarthy: He fought it administratively within the appeals process for the civil service.
Prof. David Johnson: First, he writes all kinds of letters to civil service and writes to the president and writes to members of Congress.
Hannah McCarthy: For years, Frank tried every avenue available to appeal his termination. Each appeal was rejected. So Frank took it to the courts. He personally drafted up the legal paperwork, a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Prof. David Johnson: At this point, he's literally unemployable because in 1950s Cold War America, if you have a PhD in astronomy, the government is pretty much where you're going to work for or some government contractor where you need a security clearance. And he couldn't get such a job. He's almost starving to death as he struggles with the government.
Dr. Lillian Faderman: He was living on, as he said, frankfurters and boiled eggs, which were cheap. And that was his diet.
Nick Capodice: Sounds awful. Did he ever get his job back?
Hannah McCarthy: No, he never did. David actually described seeing Frank near the end of his life.
Prof. David Johnson: You know, he's kind of disheveled and his teeth are bad. He doesn't really look very good. And part of that is because he was impoverished for much of his life, because he literally couldn't find a job.
Nick Capodice: How many people lost their jobs during the Lavender scare?
Prof. David Johnson: Well, we'll never know definitively. We have some partial figures. The State Department alone, which is kind of where the controversy began and was most intense. And department officials admitted in the 1960s to firing 1400 suspected gay men and lesbians. And that's just the State Department. So extrapolating from that, there were probably between five and 10,000 people who lost their jobs because of the lavender scare. And that doesn't even include there are people who chose not to apply. People who chose not to apply for another job or a promotion because they would be investigated doesn't count applicants who were who were denied jobs because they already had figured out they were gay.
Hannah McCarthy: People ended up switching fields entirely, sometimes getting much lower paid positions because they could not get a job of the same level that they had when they were working for the federal government.
Nick Capodice: You said at the beginning, Hanna, that Frank Kameny helped to bring an end to the Lavender scare, right?
Hannah McCarthy: He did, because although all the mechanisms failed. Frank the appeals process, lawmakers, the Supreme Court, he became an activist.
Prof. David Johnson: And he decides and I'll get other people involved in this struggle. And so he founded the Mattachine Society of of Washington, D.C. They begin a whole new kind of level of activism in the gay community.
Archive: The magazine Society picketed the State Department and got this reaction from Dean Rusk. I understand that we're being picketed by a group of homosexuals. The policy of the department is that we do not employ homosexuals knowingly, and that if we discover homosexuals in our department, we discharge them. There's a department that is concerned with the security of the United States.
Hannah McCarthy: By 1969, they were winning cases in the federal courts.
Prof. David Johnson: The federal courts are saying to the civil service, you can't prove a connection between Frank Kameny or anyone else is off duty conduct as a gay person and their ability to perform their job. You have to stop this.
Hannah McCarthy: Finally, by 1975, the Civil Service Commission, this was an agency that made sure federal employees were hired based on merit instead of nepotism, changed its policy to reflect the federal court's decision. And back to Frank's activism, by the way, he was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr's model of nonviolent civil action.
Dr. Lillian Faderman: And they actually members of the Mattachine Society in Washington attended Martin Luther King's March on Washington in 1963, and they actually said among themselves to each other, Why can't we do this for the gay community? Why can't we have a march on Washington?
Prof. David Johnson: So when magazine of Washington. Folks decide to pick it in 1965. It's a very controversial decision. It's never been done before. They don't know what's going to happen. They're afraid they're going to be attacked. Certainly a lot of them are afraid they'll they'll lose their jobs, whether in the government or elsewhere.
Dr. Lillian Faderman: And this was the first time in history that homosexuals, perhaps LGBTQ people, as we would call them, now, dared to appear in public, holding signs protesting the government's treatment of homosexuals. In 1965, Frank Kameny organized a protest in front of the White House. He organized a protest in front of the State Department. The protest in front of the Pentagon. A protest in Philadelphia, in front of the Liberty Bell.
Hannah McCarthy: That Philadelphia protest became an annual event.
Nick Capodice: But is this is this where pride parades come from?
Hannah McCarthy: It is a precursor to pride parades, but it looked very different. There were no rainbow flags, no floats, no incredibly dressed people. But there was a dress code of sorts.
Prof. David Johnson: They sort of camouflage themselves in a way, and a lot of them are they wear sunglasses, which isn't just a way of hiding a little bit. And they're sort to to dress up. So the men are wearing suits and ties and the women are in dresses and heels. And that was probably Frank Kameny. His idea like, we need to you know, we're claiming we want to be employed by the federal government. We need to look employable. And it's also a sort of politics of respectability. We don't want to be seen as these crazy radicals.
Dr. Lillian Faderman: Not only did they have to dress respectably, but they couldn't behave in what the straight world would consider an outrageous manner. And so there was no holding hands. For instance, they had to march single file. There was no chanting. They just had to carry signs that pointed out how unjust it was for the government to discriminate against homosexuals.
Hannah McCarthy: Frank was a product of his time, and conformity was seen as a way to make gains by being non-threatening. And David Johnson argued that in some ways this is still true today.
Prof. David Johnson: Well, I think in some ways the lavender scare helps explain why it is someone like Pete Buttigieg that emerges as the first openly gay presidential candidate was taken seriously.
Archive: You know, I served under General Dunford, way under General Dunford in Afghanistan.
Prof. David Johnson: Because the lavender scare created so much suspicion about gay people as subversives, as as as suspected communists, as somehow a threat to national security and and to American morality. So it takes a candidate like Pete Buttigieg, who is a veteran of the US military. He's religious. He's married to another man. He now has kids to demonstrate to to skeptical Americans. Right. That gay people are not are not immoral and they're not a threat and they're not these crazy radicals or communists. Right.
Archive: Rush Limbaugh, to whom the president recently awarded the nation's top civilian honor, described you as a 37 year old gay guy, mayor of South Bend, who loves to kiss his husband on the debate stage. Now, there has been bipartisan criticism of him for those remarks. I wanted to give you a chance to respond if you would like to.
Archive: Well, I love my husband. I'm faithful to my husband. On stage, we usually just go for a hug. But I love him very much. And I'm not going to take lectures on family values from the likes of Rush Limbaugh.
Hannah McCarthy: Pete Buttigieg, who was appointed by President Biden as secretary of Transportation, which, by the way, made him the first openly gay cabinet member in U.S. history, has been able to express his love for his husband, Chasten, without being disqualified for public service. And that is a direct result of the LGBTQ+ movement that Frank helped to build.
Nick Capodice: So what happened to that? Executive Order? Order 10450.
Hannah McCarthy: Barack Obama officially repealed Executive Order 10450. On his last day in office. Frank Kameny was standing beside him.
Archive: Doesn't make much sense. But today in America, millions of our fellow citizens wake up and go to work with the awareness that they could lose their job not because of anything they do or fail to do, but because of who they are. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender. And that's wrong. We're here to do what we can to make it right.
Hannah McCarthy: We still do not have federal protections for LGBTQ+ people across the board.
Dr. Lillian Faderman: There are certainly LGBTQ rights ordinances in various municipalities. There are states that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual identification or gender identification. There isn't yet federal protection for LGBTQ people. There is a bill, and there from time to time, the bill keeps popping up in Congress and has never managed to pass. But it it would assure protections for LGBTQ people on a federal level, but it doesn't yet exist.
Hannah McCarthy: The Lavender scare was a dark time in American history, but it also helped to pave the way for the gay liberation movement.
Dr. Lillian Faderman: I think the lavender scare is important for young people to know about because I really believe in the adage that if you don't know about history, you're destined to repeat it. And I think we were beginning to see how easily that can happen with don't say, gay bills in in Florida and and Arizona and the censorship of books that deal with LGBTQ subjects. We could come upon bad times again. And it's important to to know how bad times were in the past and to to prepare in case they happen again and to to take from history an inspiration to know that the good times that young LGBTQ people and our allies enjoyed today didn't always exist. They they came about because there was a long fight for our rights. And if times become bad again, I think people have to take inspiration from the history of the past.
Hannah McCarthy: This week's episode was produced by Jackie Fulton and Rebecca Lavoie and hosted by me, Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice. Christina Phillips is our senior producer. Music In this episode by Bright Arm Orchestra. Circles Nouvelles Zillow's Echo. Wendy Marchini Crosses Gridded Blue Sessions, Chris Zabriskie, Mary Riddell, Arthur Benson and KUSP. Don't forget to follow us wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. And if you're looking for the archive, you can find the entire thing and a bunch of other resources at our website civics101podcast.org. Civic's. 101 is a production of NPR New Hampshire Public Radio.