The Lavender Scare overlapped with the Red Scare, a period of intense fear and paranoia around communism. That overlap was useful to the people creating the panic. Through very intentional language, Joseph McCarthy and other Republicans helped tie communism to homosexuality in the public imagination, treating both as hidden threats that could weaken the country from within. Some even claimed communists were trying to convert American youth to homosexuality.
To set the stage: it is the late 1940s, just after World War II. Women and men had been pulled into new roles during the war effort, and plenty of people had no interest in going back to the old domestic normal. In that climate of anxiety, any sign that traditional gender roles or sexual conformity were slipping felt like a national emergency. Morals were supposedly in freefall. Society was supposedly coming undone.
And in the middle of that panic, homosexuals dared to exist.
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The cruelty of the Lavender Scare was policy from the beginning. In 1950, the Hoey Committee helped make gay federal workers into official threats, declaring them unsuitable for government work and dangerous to positions of public trust. Three years later, Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450 turned that panic into a wider federal purge, with “sexual perversion” treated as a national security concern.
Historians estimate that somewhere between 5,000 and tens of thousands of gay workers lost their jobs during the Lavender Scare. The National Park Service places the number of federal employees fired or forced out between 7,000 and 10,000. Some people died by suicide rather than face unemployment and the public humiliation that came with exposure.
The ban on gay people in federal civil service was not officially ended until 1975, and discrimination in security clearances lasted even longer. The federal government did not fully end sexual orientation discrimination in security clearance decisions until 1995.
The damage outlived the policy. The records grew cleaner while the suspicion remained.
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Sources:
“These People Are Frightened to Death” Congressional Investigations and the Lavender Scare Judith Adkins
The Lavender Scare by David K. Johnson
Queer America’s interview with David K. Johnson
Executive Order 10450: Eisenhower and the Lavender Scare National Park Service
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