HISTORY IS often cyclical; after a period of increasing acceptance, fears that sexual and gender minorities pose a serious threat to society’s values and well-being are now back in fashion. Sociologists label widespread fears in response to a perceived threat—which is usually imaginary or exaggerated—as a “moral panic.” Reactions to moral panics typically include legal and policy actions focused on the perceived threat. Recent anti-LGBT legislation and policy directives coming from federal and state governments are a product of the United States’ most recent moral panic, with its obsessive focus on issues of sexual and specifically gender identity.
An executive order issued by President Donald Trump on January 20 asserts the following: “Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers.” The order goes on to explain that the federal government recognizes two sexes, male and female, which are established “at conception” and “are not changeable.” Gender identity, it maintains, is a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality,” essentially negating the existence of transgender people. Following this policy directive, major media outlets such as The New York Times and the Associated Press reported federal agencies censoring or removing documents that include terms such as “transgender,” “nonbinary,” and “lgbtq” from their public websites.
One week later, Trump issued another Executive Order: “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness.” Stating that a successful military “requires a singular focus on developing the requisite warrior ethos,” the order bars transgender men and women from serving in the armed forces, asserting that “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service.” This was followed by a third Executive Order on January 28th attacking transgender medical care in misleading terms: “Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.” Charging that gender-affirming care is founded on “junk science,” this order directs federal agencies providing research or education grants to medical institutions to take immediate steps to “end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.”
Each of these orders has been challenged in federal court, leading to delays in their implementation. The final outcome of these cases remains uncertain, but however they fare, attacks on the LGBT community—and transgender Americans in particular—are likely to continue. Even before the issuance of the January 28th order, several states had adopted bans on gender-affirming care for transgender minors—and the proposed restrictions are not limited to children and teens. According to a 2024 position paper from the American College of Physicians, some states are considering bans through the age of 26 or restricting care for transgender patients of all ages.
Watching these events unfold, I cannot help reflecting upon our federal government’s response to an earlier moral panic, one that conflated homosexuality with Communism and resulted in upward of 10,000 men and women losing their jobs and a nearly quarter-century ban on gay men and women serving in the federal government. The ways in which gay and lesbian Americans were persecuted by the U.S. government during the Cold War are detailed by David K. Johnson in his 2004 book The Lavender Scare. In mid-20th-century America, an irrational panic about the risks of homosexuals serving in government developed alongside a re-invigoration of the Communist bugaboo—the rationale being that homosexuals were morally unfit and prone to drunkenness and blackmail, both of which might result in the disclosure of sensitive government information. Despite its significance, the history of the Lavender Scare is generally not well known, being largely overshadowed by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s efforts to root out domestic Communists.
In early 1950s America, the fear of an expanding worldwide Communism, exacerbated by the Korean War, increased concerns about domestic subversion and espionage. Only three years earlier, in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee held widely publicized hearings on the influence of Communism within the motion picture industry, leading to the blacklisting of roughly 300 Hollywood actors, screenwriters, directors, and other figures. The previous year, Congress had attached the so-called “McCarran rider” to the State Department appropriations bill, giving the secretary of state “absolute discretion” to summarily fire any government employee considered a threat to national security. Clearly, concerns about security within the U.S. government weren’t new, but when Senator Joseph McCarthy gave a speech to the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950, asserting that the State Department was riddled with traitors—205 members of the Communist Party—it made national headlines and prompted a swift Congressional reaction.
Shortly after McCarthy’s public appearance in West Virginia and a subsequent Senate speech on “security risks” at the State Department, Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Undersecretary John Peurifoy appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee. Upon questioning, Peurifoy admitted that 91 people in a “shady category” who had been under investigation as security risks had resigned from the State Department or been fired under the McCarran rider. When asked to clarify what he meant by “shady category,” Peurifoy acknowledged that most were homosexual. A month later, the head of Washington, D.C.’s Vice Squad, Lieutenant Roy Blick, testified to a Senate subcommittee that more than 5,000 gay people lived in the nation’s capital and about 3,700 were employed by the federal government.
From respected daily newspapers to tabloid “tell-alls,” the media reinforced the notion that homosexuals were unfit to serve in the federal government. Robert Roark, a syndicated columnist for the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance, warned that homosexuals “travel in packs,” were prone to blackmail, and were unfit to serve in the State Department. On April 19, 1950, The New York Times published an article under the headline, “Perverts Called Government Peril; Gabrielson, G.O.P. Chief, Says They Are as Dangerous as Reds.” In The Lavender Scare, Johnson opines that “the constant pairing of ‘Communists and queers’ led many to see them as indistinguishable threats.” Recurrent media attention only amplified public concerns that any homosexual employed by government posed a serious threat to American security.
Responding to these worries, the Senate resolved in June 1950 to undertake a comprehensive investigation of “homosexuals and other moral perverts” who were employed by the federal government. The committee conducting the inquiry was chaired by Senator Clyde Hoey. After hearing from law enforcement, federal agencies, judicial authorities, and members of the medical community, the committee released its final report in December of that year: “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government.” Stating that all U.S. government agencies were in complete agreement that “sex perverts” constituted a security risk, the report concluded that homosexuals should not be employed by the government. Characterizing homosexuals as a bad influence on the young, the document also warned that even a single homosexual could “pollute a government office.” It should be noted that no gay men or lesbians provided testimony before the committee during its investigation.
Initial concerns about the danger of homosexuals in government had distinct partisan overtones, with McCarthy and his followers accusing the Truman administration of failing to recognize the seriousness of the threat. Following the release of the Hoey committee’s report, the policy of denying employment to and removing homosexuals from federal government service garnered broad bipartisan support and eventually became accepted as standard policy, spelled out in federal security manuals across offices in the U.S. and abroad.
When Dwight Eisenhower headed the Republican presidential ticket in 1952 with Richard Nixon as his running mate, their campaign posters trumpeted the slogan: “Let’s Clean House.” According to David K. Johnson, the candidates’ references to “wickedness in government” and charges of “immorality” within the Truman Administration were coded phrases, meant to raise fears about homosexuals in government. In the spring after his inauguration, Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which dismantled the previous system for assuring the loyalty of federal employees and replaced it with a different process that included much broader security criteria. In addition to barring employment to those with ties to Communist or other suspect organizations, the order focused heavily on character and specified behaviors that would automatically preclude federal employment: “Any criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct, habitual use of intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, sexual perversion.” Now men and women whose patriotism and loyalty to the U.S. were beyond reproach could be fired or denied employment in the federal government based solely on their sexuality.
It wasn’t until 1975 that the U.S. Civil Service Commission ended the ban on gay men and lesbians in federal civil service; two years later, the State Department followed suit pertaining to employment in the Foreign Service. But by then, the moral panic about homosexuals in government had resulted in an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 resignations or firings and unrecorded thousands of well-qualified men and women who avoided applying for jobs in government because of their sexual orientation. In some instances, the negative consequences were even more profound: an unknown number of those who were under investigation or fired on allegations of homosexuality died by suicide.
While the suffering caused by the Lavender Scare is undeniable, its legacy is not entirely negative. Johnson is among those historians who point out that the oppression of these anti-gay purges eventually galvanized gay men and women to fight back. Frank Kameny’s transformation from Harvard-trained astronomer to gay rights activist was catalyzed by his 1957 firing from the Army Map Service in the U.S. Department of Defense on suspicion of homosexuality. Although his subsequent appeal to the Civil Service Commission was unsuccessful, it was the first known civil rights claim based on sexual orientation pursued in a U.S. court.
Will the current moral panic over gender identity and transgender rights follow a trajectory similar to that of the Lavender Scare? Will government continue to discriminate against people whose gender identities do not match the sex recorded on their birth certificates? Or will our legislators and leaders come to understand that variations in sexual and gender identity are simply expressions of the diversity of humankind?
I believe that ignorance was at the heart of McCarthyism. While many elected officials used the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare to promote a political agenda, a better-informed populace would not have fallen prey to the moral panic that identified homosexuality as a threat commensurate with Communism. When leaders, legislators, and the public at large come to understand that diverse sexual and gender identities are not a threat to society but instead a manifestation of humanity’s dazzling complexity, they will stop supporting efforts to persecute and negate these individuals.
References
Adkins, Judith. “These People are Frightened to Death.” Congressional Investigations and the Lavender Scare. In Prologue, vol 48, no. 2 (Summer 2016).
Johnson, David K. The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Ronald O. Valdiserri, MD, is a professor of epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University.
