Lavender Scare

The Lavender Scare refers to the fear and persecution of homosexuals in the 1950s in the United States, which paralleled the anti-communist campaign known as McCarthyism.

Because the psychiatric community regarded homosexuality as a mental illness, gay men and lesbians were considered susceptible to blackmail, thus constituting a security risk. U.S. government officials assumed that communists would blackmail homosexual employees of the federal government who would provide them classified information rather than risk exposure.

In 1950, the same year that Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed 205 communists were working in the State Department, Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy said that the State Department had allowed 91 homosexuals to resign.

McCarthy hired Roy Cohn &mdash; who some allege was a closeted homosexual &mdash; as chief counsel of his Congressional subcommittee. Together, McCarthy and Cohn were responsible for the firing of scores of gay men from government employment, and strong-armed many opponents into silence using rumors of their homosexuality.

The term for this persecution was popularized by David K. Johnson's study of this anti-homosexual campaign, The Lavender Scare, which drew its title from the term "lavender lads," used repeatedly by Sen. Everett Dirksen as a synonym for homosexuals. In 1952 he said that a Republican victory in the November elections would mean the removal of "the lavender lads" from the State Department. The phrase was also used by Confidential magazine, a periodical known for gossiping about the sexuality of politicians and prominent Hollywood stars.

A feature-length documentary film by producer-director Josh Howard, The Lavender Scare, based on Johnson's book of the same name, has been scheduled for release in the summer of 2013.