The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government
by David K. Johnson
University of Chicago Press. 277 pages, $30.
ON THE SOLSTICE earlier this summer here in Washington, D.C., I walked west on Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to 9th Street. I looked north and remembered the gay bars that were there when I moved to D.C. in the 1970’s: the Hideaway, the Rogue, the Lone Star, Carroll’s Tavern, the Eagle, and the Exile. They were all gone. But to my immediate left was the J. Edgar Hoover Building, an ugly, forbidding tower of concrete. You cannot park near it or walk around it on the sidewalk, but I had been invited in. I had a job interview. As a gay man born long before the 70’s, I was stunned when the FBI responded to my résumé. David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare helps explain why I was so surprised.
Johnson devoted more than ten years to a project that began as a history of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance, a D.C.-based civil rights organization. The project grew with the assistance of the Gay and Lesbian Education Fund into a dissertation for his fellowship with the History Department of Northwestern University. He interviewed (and poked around in the attics of) those who knew firsthand what had happened. He skillfully organized all of this research—his footnotes, index, and oral history interviews are a treasure trove—and blended it into a 214-page narrative that reads like a novel. A Republican politician observed that most voters rarely care about or understand events outside the United States. They also tend to fear a small minority of fellow Americans who seem different from themselves, people who, if they’re spoken of at all, are mentioned only in vague terms. The politician used this fear to gain political advantage. The news media provided free publicity. The tactic proved so successful that it was used in a subsequent Presidential campaign. The year was 1950, and the politician was Senator Joe McCarthy. No one could find the 205 “card-carrying Communists in the State Department” that McCarthy claimed to have identified. But the State Department could offer up 91 homosexuals who had been removed from service. Less than a month after McCarthy’s first allegation, the charge was on to eliminate all homosexuals among the “cookie pushers in striped pants” at the State Department because of the “security risk” they were believed to create. Then within three months of taking office in 1952, President Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450, which provided all federal agencies the authority to disqualify federal employees for “sexual perversion.” The distinctions between a Communist and a homosexual had blurred, and it was easier for the federal government to identify and pursue “known homosexuals.” Johnson paints a vivid portrait of gay Washington culture in the 1930’s and 40’s. He draws upon literature, oral history interviews, and the available few memoirs. This chapter will be of most interest to Washingtonians who followed the “Fairies and Fair Dealers” to D.C. to work in the “gigantic governmental apparatus” that had developed during the Roosevelt Administration. Many gay and lesbian people lived just north and west of the White House (as well as in Georgetown), and this section of D.C. became the Greenwich Village for “eggheads.” Johnson suggests that this vibrant gay community became visible and hence vulnerable. It was easy for the government to go after the gay community, for it could not (and would not) fight back. So what was it like for gay Washingtonians in the 1950’s who were targeted by the government? In the words of one who was pursued, “underneath it all there was a subdued hysteria.” Johnson evokes a sense of what it was like to live with such fear and powerlessness. For federal employees, it explains why many “deviant bureaucrats” continued to steer clear of the “hands on hip set.” Imagine going to work every day afraid that you could be fired and blacklisted from all future employment because you appeared “unstable” in dress, “bohemian” in lifestyle, or exhibited “personality problems.” Eventually a fighter emerged in the person of Frank Kameny. Johnson refers to him as a “victim,” a label that does not quite fit. Kameny lost his career as an astronomer, but he gained an important place in history as the first federal employee to pursue legal action in an attempt to regain his job. As a result of his early challenges, subsequent court decisions required the federal government to demonstrate a nexus between status, off-the-job behavior, and fitness for employment. This section of Lavender Scare could have been further developed. The legal process that put the question before Judge David Bazelon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit deserves a more thorough treatment. The Lavender Scare provides a superb overview of this period in American history for those who are somewhat familiar with what happened and for those who are not, and supplies ample documentation for those who wish to learn more. It’s a must-read for gay and lesbian federal employees, and would serve as an excellent text for college or graduate-level courses in history, sociology, political science, or gay studies. And what happened to me at the FBI? The interview went well. They said they would call me in the next month or so. But they ended the interview with a reminder that any offer of employment would be contingent upon passing a lie detector test, taking a drug test, being fingerprinted, and submitting to a full background investigation. This does not frighten me. Thank you, Frank Kameny. Lawrence Reynolds is an attorney for a federal agency in Washington.
_____________________________________________________
