In the late 1940s and 1950s, alongside the better known “Red Scare” that targeted alleged internal political enemies – American Communists – the US government led a crusade against gay men and women in the military and civil service. During the “Lavender Scare,” thousands of people were fired or forced from their jobs, dishonorably discharged from the military, and denied positions in the US government because of their sexuality. And those policies were enforced for decades – through “liberal” administrations, and the federal decriminalization of same-sex sex in 2003 – with life-ruining, and life-ending consequences for tens of thousands of Americans. And since we’re basically reliving this awful period in history because Republicans believe that a time of queer persecution, women as second class citizens, and segregation and racism is America’s “great” era, we better know the history so we can know how to fight. 

US 

Transcript for I’m So Sick of History Rhymes: Executive Orders, Dog Whistles, and the Lavender Scare 

Written and researched by Averill Earls, PhD

Produced by Averill Earls and Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD 

Warning: I wrote this episode while feeling a lot of rage. And rage deserves an appropriately rageful vocabulary. So for the version of this that we release on the podcatchers, I’m not going to censor a goddamned word. If you’re a teacher who wants a clean version of this episode, you’ll find it on the website. This is important history, a reminder that we’ve been here before and we can claw our way out if we fight hard enough. But it also really sucks that we’re here, and we have four years of open bigotry and violence and hate speech to endure and battle. I hope this episode equips you with more context. Scream into the void, cry on your friend’s shoulder, and then donate to the ACLU.

Averill: If you went to high school  in the US, you probably know about at least one “witch hunt” of the 1950s: the so-called “Red Scare” that targeted a nebulous “internal enemy”, the American Communist. The hunt for communists targeted intellectuals at universities and the liberal elements of Hollywood as well as federal employees. In effect, they targeted those who had the potential to teach a new generation how to think (rather than WHAT to think), and those who had a more rapt audience than the federal government has ever had or would ever have. You might’ve read The Crucible in English class, talked about how it was a thinly veiled allegory for the hunt for Communists, and how McCarthyism seized control of daily life and media between 1950-1955.

What you probably didn’t talk much about was the fact that very few Communists were actually found in the US government – which is where they were supposed to pose the real threat to American national security. There were thousands of people fired or forced to resign during the period of McCarthy’s witch hunts, but very few were confirmed communists. They were, instead, gay men and women. US Senators and newspapers convinced themselves and the public that the double-life of the “homosexual” – who had to keep their true selves secret because of the shame and illegality of their sexual desires – made them susceptible to blackmail and also communist ideology. The lesser-known “Lavender Scare” resulted in thousands of people being fired or forced from their jobs, dishonorably discharged from the military, and denied positions in the US government because of their sexuality. And those policies were enforced for decades – well after McCarthy faded from the political spotlight – and straight through “liberal” administrations (1960, 1964, 1974, 1992, and 1996), and the federal decriminalization of same-sex sex in 2003. The “Lavender Scare” had long term, life-ruining, and life-ending consequences for tens of thousands of Americans.

I know. Even the thought of slogging through the history of something that is going to feel so familiar, so painfully repeated, is daunting. But we need to know. We need to be ready. We need to hold the line in solidarity and speak truth to power because if we don’t, the climb back is going to be much harder, and because we need to fight for the most vulnerable among us.

I’m Averill Earls.

And I’m glad Phyllis Schlafly is dead, and hope a few more follow her to hell. Also known as Sarah Handley-Cousins.

And we are your historians for this episode of Dig.

Sarah: Quick shout out to all our Patrons, especially those boss Augers and Excavators: Lisa, Karl, Karen, Jessy, Maria, Denise, Edward, Lauren, Colin, Susan, and Alissa. Thank you. These are shitty times, and we appreciate your support. You keep us going. patreon.com/digpodcast to learn more.

Averill: This is an episode I’ve probably actually been writing in the back of my mind for nigh on 15 years. Allan Berube’s book Coming Out Under Fire was published in 1990, and already a standard on LGBT history reading lists before I even got the twinkle of a phd in my eye. David K. Johnson’s book The Lavender Scare was published in 2004 – the year I graduated high school! My advisor, Paul Deslandes, made sure both were on my comprehensive exams list. The stories of dishonorable discharge from the military and the FBI-supported witch hunt for queer people in the civil service are so ingrained into my brain that they’re like memories of something I lived through myself. And in some ways, since I grew up in the era of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, I guess it wasn’t ever really that far off. But anyway, this episode is largely drawn from their writings, plus a bunch of historians who’ve been building on Johnson and Berube’s works in the intervening years. As always, I’m grateful to these scholars for their work, for peeling back the curtain on these histories, and especially for the bits that are like roadmaps for how to fight oppression and injustice. We still have so much to learn from history. And hopefully, someday, we can stop reliving it.

Sarah: In the first week of his second term, the 47th President of the United States started issuing all kinds of bullshit executive orders. These orders are straight out of the Project 2025 playbook created by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation intended to remake America into a white supremacist Christian nationalist dystopia. It’s been pretty awful. Logically we can look at a lot of these orders and see that they are clearly meant to test the limits of the executive branch of government, and our so-called checks and balances system. Will Congress preserve its right to the country’s purse strings? (Answer: probably not, under the now Republican-controlled House and Senate). Will the Supreme Court prevent the president from assuming the powers of a king? (Answer: Nope; if anything, the pseudo-nonpartisan life-term fuckwads have been working toward crowning him.) It’s a nightmare, folks. A fucking nightmare.

Averill: He’s issuing orders, and sending agents of the state to enforce them. The sheer barrage is meant to overwhelm us, so that we feel like there’s nothing we can do. But as evidenced in the last few weeks, when there are mass rejections and resistance, the bullshit is pulled back. Today we’re going to focus on three (of the many) that are specifically targeting trans people, and trace the roots to earlier “morality policing” spearheaded by the federal government. Because history doesn’t repeat, but it sure as shit rhymes.

Sarah: On day one of the 47th’s presidency, some staffer pushed this EO in front of him, and he signed it: “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT” (January 20, 2025). That order claims, incorrectly, that “science” proves that there are only two fixed and definable sexes and genders, and people assigned female at birth are women, people assigned male at birth are men, and that the United States will no longer recognize people’s ability to self determination. Official federal documentation (for example, passports), must reflect sex assigned at birth. We already did an episode on the longer history of gender and sex, and how, in FACT, there isn’t an “ordinary and longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms” for sex and gender. Actually, historians have demonstrated extensively the mutablility of those concepts over time. And scientists of course are constantly refining our understanding of the nuanced biological diversity of human hormone-production and genitals, which both change over the lifetime of a person, and are widely varied across the spectrum of human bodily experience. We are far more than the sum of our parts.

We knew this was coming. We knew, because the Republicans have been mobilizing an anti-trans dog whistle in their campaigns for the last decade. In 2024 alone, 672 anti-trans bills were introduced across 43 states. 50 were passed. In the first month of 2025, 381 anti-trans bills have already been introduced across 43 states, two have already passed, and it is barely February. The steady increase of this attack on trans people is terrifying. Institutional anti-trans policies and rhetoric embolden anti-trans violence in public spaces. Instead of leading the way and setting an example of acceptance and respect for our fellow citizens, the US government is inciting hate and doing intentional harm.

Averill: This order, and the ideology behind it, denies a person’s bodily autonomy and their self-determination. And it will fuel and issue apologia for violence against trans people, and, of course, have long-term ramifications. Last week I was interviewing a graduate of my college for an oral history project, and they talked about the time the school brought Milo Yiannopoulos to speak. If you’re unfamiliar, Yiannopoulos is one of the anti-trans conservative talking heads who insists that gender is attached to sex assigned at birth; where ever he goes, violence against trans people follows. When this former student was in the bathroom, a person who’d come to campus to attend the talk – one of Yiannopoulos’ fans, clearly – accosted the 20-year-old trans student in the bathroom. The 2025 executive order, and every anti-trans piece of legislation proposed across the United States, isn’t about “defending women” or “children.” It will not protect anyone. It will only endanger more trans and gender queer people, as this kind of rhetoric, when subsidized and espoused by the government, emboldens the hateful and violent, and ensures that trans and queer people have no legal recourse when they are attacked.

That’s the reality. Saying that there aren’t trans people doesn’t make trans people not exist.

Sarah: A week later, building on the disgusting momentum of a week of stupid and dangerous executive orders, he signed: “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness” (January 27, 2025). This one expels trans people from the US military, predicated, again, on all kinds of absurd and dangerous lies and mischaracterizations about trans people. The language and moralizing of this EO, like the previous, may as well have been written by Eisenhower in 1953. It perpetuates the problematic medicalization of gender and gender identity, just like the DSM bullhockey the US government replicated during the Lavender Scare to exclude gay men and women from the military and civil service. The institutionalization of the discrimination had extremely long-term effects. People were dishonorably discharged for decades when they were outed, which meant they lost access to GI benefits like education funding, loans for homes, and health care.

Averill: So yeah, the results of these EOs will fuck up a lot of lives. There are an estimated 8,000 trans members of the military, but likely more. If they don’t conform to the current administration’s zealot gender ideology, they will lose — everything. For some, literally. A lot of people join the military because they don’t have other options. And as I finished writing this, he signed another one – banning trans women from women’s sports. It’s just the beginning.

All these executive orders, if they are permitted by courts and our legislature to stand, will do long-term damage. Set aside the concerns that this administration is testing the boundaries of the executive’s power in what is clearly an effort to dismantle democracy, obliterate the checks and balances system, and establish a dictatorship. Maybe it’ll hold and he’ll be gone in 4 years, maybe even made impotent by a flipped legislature in 2026… or maybe it’ll be worse than we can imagine. But set that aside. What’s really bad about this is that 1) future administrations are not guaranteed to fix all the damage this one is doing, and for many it will be far too late; and 2) with the federal system perpetrating this violence against trans people, legitimizing it, it makes those hundreds of anti-trans bills in various states all the easier to pass and harder to overturn or challenge. The federal and the state systems are violating basic human and civil rights. So we have a long road ahead of us. We know this, because this has happened before.

Sarah: Jake Newsome’s fantastic Pink Triangle Legacies project has been highlighting the NSDAP violence against queer and trans people in 1930s Germany in really insightful social media posts – check them out on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube to learn more. But we don’t even have to go to another country to find this kind of crusade in the recent past. (And this is a crusade, in the sense of a pointless war in the name of Christian nationalism intended to distract the public from the real enemy (the politicians and billionaires) with invented moral panics.) This is a page right out of history, folks. Right out of the Repbublican’s beloved 1950s, in fact. That’s where we’re headed. To the nightmare era of the Lavender Scare, the US government’s state-based and state-incited violence against queer people, and the long road – and fight – for queer civil rights.

Averill: In April 1953 President Dwight Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450. This was the first civil service law that explicitly stated that “sexual perversion” was grounds for not hiring and for firing federal workers.^[1] But the executive order wasn’t the catalyst for the Lavender Scare. If anything, it was the policy culmination in what had been a longer-running campaign against so-called “moral weaklings,” “undesirables,” and, occasionally more bluntly,  “sexual perverts.”^[2]

Sarah: During WW2, the military started trying to screen for gender queer and potentially “homosexual” individuals. Men had been joining the military and having sex with other men for…ever. It doesn’t matter what country or time period we’re talking about, if someone organized an army, I can guarantee that there were dudes having sex with each other in that army. Historians like George Chauncey, Matt Houlbrook, Tom Hulme, James Dayhoff, AD Harvey, and many others have chronicled the particularly fruitful explosion of queer sexual opportunity and community during WW1 across the US, Britain, and elsewhere. In the first world war, soldiers dressed in drag to entertain other soldiers, sailors sold sex to other men in every port city they landed, and there were many deeply intimate and sometimes physical relationships between soldiers on the front. Most European and North American militaries had anti-sodomy rules in an effort to try and dissuade the sexual entanglement of soldiers, to little effect.

Averill: If and where women were allowed to participate in the war effort, you’d find lesbians – driving ambulances like May “Toupie” Lowther, tending to the wounded like Ethel Mary Smyth, or delivering supplies like Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas. You’d also find them among those opposing the war, as members of the Women’s Peace Party and other pacifist organizations, like Lida Gustava Heymann. 

Sarah: A sort of semi-public queer culture expanded in the 20th century, particularly after WW1, with those friends and lovers collected during war time needing place and space to grow. The postwar period saw a flourishing of gay and lesbian bars in places like New York City, London, Paris, and Berlin, drag balls, a print culture that helped queer people find each other and potential lovers, and greater economic and individual freedom thanks to expanding urbanization and industrialization. There’d been queer cultural and social institutions in earlier centuries – the molly houses of the 18th and 19th centuries, the theater scene, rent boys in every city selling newspapers and sex, the rumors of Sapphism among the Bluestockings, a kind of aristocratic homoeroticism embraced by the likes of Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman. But the 20th century certainly created all kinds of new possibilities, especially for working class young people.

Averill: World War 2 was both a continuation of all of this, and a backlash. As Allan Berube has shown, the US military has always been a draw for young queer people; homosocial bonding and spaces, economic independence from family, and (for some) opportunities to travel to places they might see as more “open” to queer desire. (Side note: this is something they had in common with queer agents of empire – civil servants and the like – who’d go to and exploit the sexual economies of colonized peoples. Unfortunate but quite common. Roger Casement, E.M. Forster, and various other people.) We’ll put some recommended readings in the show notes.

Sarah: And listen to our episode on Roger Casement, because we talked about this at some length when we talked about his journals, his liaisons, we’ll say.

Averill: Yeah, and also the episode based on Laurie Marhoefer’s book, about Magnus Hirschfeld, who was himself a queer imperialist. Women like Sergeant Nell “Johnnie” Phelps of the Women’s Auxiliary Corps joined up both because they wanted to serve their country and saw the opportunity to resist gender norms and expectations, and seek out other women like them.

Sarah: Notably, after the war, Phelps claimed that she talked Eisenhower out of conducting a witch hunt for lesbians in WAC by telling him that if he did, her name would be at the top of the list. This story has been repeated in several documentaries, but historians haven’t been able to substantiate it, and actually have evidence that she wouldn’t have been able to sit down in a meeting to have that conversation with Eisenhower, based on where he and she were stationed throughout the war. It’s become part of the popular memory of WW2 queer history, not least because of what Eisenhower did afterwards with EO 10450, and the reality of lesbians being very much part of the WAC. A fun little false anecdote, in any case.

Averill: In Germany, the work of gay rights advocates like Magnus Hirschfeld–which included issuing legal documentation for people to inhabit the gender identity that was right for them, regardless of sex assigned at birth–were undone literally overnight. The Nazi party passed expansions on earlier anti-sodomy laws to make arresting queer and trans people easier, throwing them in prison or concentration camps by the thousands.

Sarah: In the US, WW2 was the first time that the military started screening potential recruits for “signs” of sexual abnormality, as well as a range of physical and mental disabilities. The military wanted to exclude the disabled who would, later, need long-term health care under the purview of the Veteran’s Administration. Men and women were sorted into various classifications to determine if they were “fit” or “unfit” for military service (in eugenic terms). Class 4-F referred to men who were deemed “unfit for service due to physical, mental, or moral reasons.” Medical and military officials believed that they could identify a homosexual based on how he or she walked, talked, and or looked that didn’t meet “normal” masculine or feminine standards. This rule was applied more frequently to men, whose sexual behavior – or potential – was perceived a threat to the “normal” American soldier.

Averill: Scholar Julian Carter has shown that between 1880-1940, cultural discourses of whiteness and heterosexuality fused to form a new concept of the “normal” American, wrapped up in eugenic thought and white supremacy. “Normal” was defined in these medical, political, and social discourses as white and heterosexual – so things like the “normal” body type, weight, proportions, etc, were based on the average white cis man and white cis woman. And this was done quite literally – two archetypes of the “average” American were created for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, named “Normman” and “Norma.” Norman was based on the measurements of several million 20-year-old “Doughboys” (WW1 recruits) and Ivy League students. Norma was the average of 15,000 American women from across the US.

Sarah: The bodily standards extracted from those averages, from this invented “normal” phenotype of “American” men and women, have since been integrated into modern medicine, clothing sizing, and, of course, beauty standards. Think about what color the “nude” tights actually are, or how people with more melanin struggle to find make up in their shade carried in drug stores until very recently, or the absurd and racist Body Mass Index. The shape and sizes of “standard” clothes in department stores. Because of the specifics of where these sample bodies were drawn – military, colleges, etc – the majority of the bodies were white, able, and cis. Those specifications ensure that what is considered “normal” in this country is also white, able, and cis.

Averill: And at the same time, reproductive heterosexuality in “normal” married couples was redefined as central to legitimate membership in the nation – supported by things like tax incentives for married couples with children. Instead of saying what they meant – that one had to be white and heterosexual to fit into American society – Progressive-era white elites reconceived their racial and sexual ideal as “normal.” They made it seem more inclusive, even as they drew boundaries of in-group and out-group more definitively in a post-Emancipation country. Those who didn’t fit into the racial-sexual boundaries of “normality,” then, were ineligible for political or social mobility.^[3]

Sarah: Of course same-sex desiring men and women both still made it into military service, because these socially-constructed ideas of “normality” were just that – socially constructed, and not real evidence of who or what a person was or might do. And men continued to perform in drag shows for the troops, they had sex, they fell in love, they fought and died for their country and each other. Allan Berube notes that thousands made it through the screening process because of the sheer need during WW2, but that individual anti-gay military leaders would lead purging campaigns due to their own prejudices, or, if a same-sex desiring soldier or sailor was later caught having sex with someone of the same sex, they were dishonorably discharged, losing access to any and all benefits associated with veteran status.^[4] Between 1947-1950, the military purged queer men and women under the auspices of “moral depravity.” And that crusade was quickly picked up by the federal government as well.

Averill: The US saw the growth of queer public life after WW2. Historians Liz Kennedy and Madeliene Davis mapped the lesbian bar and house party scene of Buffalo NY, which proliferated after WW2.^[5] Even in the rural south, both John Howard and E. Patrick Johnson’s work demonstrates the pockets and corners where queer and trans people, white and Black, found each other, formed community, and built lives outside the constraints of heteronormative expectations.^[6] According to Berube, with greater visibility came greater backlash, from both hateful Christian nationalist and white supremacists invested in holding onto the fabricated standard of “normality” and citizenship, and from policy makers in the US government. Not all queer Americans participated in that public life openly; many of the veterans of the war, for example, did their best to conform to what was “normal.”^[7] They used the GI Bill to go to college and buy houses, took office and factory jobs, married someone of the opposite sex, and kept their heads down. Some couldn’t fully contain that part of themselves; they might follow their desires into bar bathrooms or hotel rooms, spouse aware or none the wiser, thinking what’s the harm?

Sarah: Well, the harm was if they got caught, or for those who participated a bit more openly–not entirely, of course, because their families likely “didn’t know” and that isn’t something they’d disclose to employers or coworkers or maybe even friends–if they were outed, they could lose their jobs. Some employers might’ve been reasonable, and assumed that how you comported yourself outside of the office or factory was your business. But not the US government. At the same time the military was finally enforcing its anti-homosexual policies, and dishonorably discharging thousands of active service members, a few elected officials took up the crusade as well. Amidst the growing national awareness of queer and trans people–thanks to national media coverage fomenting moral panic about the “homosexual menace” and its threat to America’s children. The media, government officials, and church leaders demanded conformity and rejected “deviance.” As Berube notes, newspaper and magazine “articles, books, advertisements,” early television programming, and films “promoted idealized versions of the nuclear family, heterosexuality, and traditional gender roles for the home and workplace.”^[8]

Averill: According to historian David K. Johnson, by November 1950, nearly 600 gay and lesbian federal civil servants were fired.^[9] Scholars of McCarthyism from the 1970s on largely ignored the US government’s targeting of “homosexuals,” either willfully or because they didn’t understand the sometimes coded language the newspapers and politicians used to describe their victims. It was true that McCarthy himself was careful to steer clear of the homosexual panic, perhaps because McCarthy was a confirmed bachelor and just as susceptible to the rumors of DC as all those who were targeted. But his colleagues Styles Bridges, Clyde Hoey, and Kenneth Wherry intentionally targeted gay men and lesbians in their anti-Communist, “moral” purge.^[10] Their claim, over and over, was that the homosexual was the most susceptible to being blackmailed by Communists, if they weren’t already Communists themselves, and so they posed a major national security risk. As Senator Wherry (R-Nebraska) put it, “can [you] think of a person who could be more dangerous to the United States of America than a pervert?”^[11]

Sarah: The alleged “threat” of the homosexual to public morality was a constant theme in American media. When it came to McCarthy’s purges, the focus was always on Communists and Communism. But of the 654 total State Department employees fired between 1946-1953, 402 left after they were accused of being homosexual.^[12] Focusing the 1950s purges to McCarthy both sidelined the much more damaging (at least in casualties) “Lavender Scare,” and also absolved the large number of Republicans and other conservatives who participated in the hunt for “internal enemies” in the early years of the Cold War. He led the charge, but he had plenty of help and support from his colleagues.

Averill: Between the 1930s and 1960s, law enforcement agencies across the US targeted gay, lesbian, and trans people in increasingly violent and public ways. In the 1940s, news agencies decided that stories of disappeared or raped and murdered children were linked to the new “homosexual” described by Alfred Kinsey in his best-selling Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Cops raided bars catering to explicitly gay, lesbian, and trans clients frequently. As Anna Lvovsky notes, police were sent into those spaces in plain clothes to catch out – and bait – queer people.^[13] In 1947, the U.S. Park Police in Washington, DC began a “Sex Perversion Elimination Program” to arrest and intimidate gay men. Vice officers surveilled public bathrooms through peepholes and two-way mirrors. In the long-run, this ramped-up policing backfired. Vice squads’ campaigns forced the public to wrestle with the law’s treatment of queer people. Their tactics also raised issues around the limits of ethical policing and the authority of “experts.”

Sarah: Among those who challenged this increased policing and harassment of queer and trans people were the early “homophile” organizations like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis (Bill-E-tis). The Mattachine Society was founded in Los Angeles in 1950 by Harry Hay, a communist organizer and gay rights activist, as well as Bob Hull, Chuck Rowland, Dale Jennings, Konrad Stevens, James Gruber, and Rudi Gernreich. Primarily white gay men occupied leadership positions in the organization, though at the time the leadership was secret – for all the sort of obvious reasons that what they were doing and who they were was illegal – and the organizational structure was modeled on communist political organizations. Their goal was to fight for gay men’s rights, and to raise awareness and educate members on the relationship between social justice and homosexuality. The LA branch of the Mattachine Society was investigated by the FBI between 1953 and 1956 under suspicion of communist activity. 

Averill: The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 in San Francisco as a lesbian rights organization. They were initially unaware of the LA gay men’s movement, but their nationally distributed and radically feminist publication The Ladder soon brought the DOB into conversation with the Mattachine Society. The LA branch moved to San Francisco in 1955, and then Mattachine chapters opened across the US – in New York in 1955, Washington DC in 1961, Chicago in 1965, Philadelphia in 1966 (by four women), and Buffalo NY in 1970 – all with a goal of challenging the legalized discrimination and harassment of queer people. Many chapters of the Mattachine Society used protest and picketing to raise awareness of queer struggles. Several enforced strict dress codes for their members on these picket lines. Men were to dress in suit and tie. Women were to wear dresses or skirts. The idea behind these “respectability politics” was to demonstrate that queer people were “normal,” that they only wanted the same basic rights as other “normal” straight people, the opportunity to form nuclear family units, be productive members of the capitalist society, and “fit in.”

Sarah: The Daughters of Bilitis were less interested in conforming to middle class and white ideas of normalcy. The DOB was founded by Philippina Rose Bamberger with her partner Rosemary Sliepen, and three other couples: Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, Marcia Foster and her partner June, and Noni Frey and her partner Mary. Initially they were a social club, trying to carve out space for themselves beyond the frequently-raided gay and lesbian bars. They quickly launched a lesbian rights movement out of Rose and Rosemary’s apartment, and began publishing The Ladder, which started out with “100 complimentary copies of the first issue […] printed and mailed to friends, friends of friends, and “professional women” (lawyers, doctors, business owners) listed in the San Francisco phone book as well as to researchers like the team working with Alfred Kinsey at Indiana University.” News of the magazine quickly spread; they were able to sustain publication with $1 subscription fees in the first year, and then $2.50 by 1957. It generated donations and spread information about social events and gatherings. By the mid-1960s, it became a leading publication in radical feminist and lesbian activism. As the “homophile” movement shifted from social and lightly political to full-on activism in the 1960s, established publications like The Ladder were essential to the movement.

Averill: As queer and trans people dared to live more openly at mid century, the anti-homosexual propaganda from the media and government ramped up and fueled hatred, harassment, and violence.  In February, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson appeared before the House Appropriations subcommittee. When pressed on the matter of “security risks” in the State House, he insisted that only one employee had ever been fired for being a potential security risk – which could include spies, Nazis, or Communists. On the subject of if or how many State Department employees had resigned after being investigated as potential security risks, Deputy Under Secretary John Peurifoy revealed that 91 people had resigned.^[14] When asked to specify what kind of security risk they posed, Peurifoy said that were “people of moral weakness and so forth.” When asked to clarify further, he said “Most of these were homosexuals, Mr. Chairman.”^[15] In the years that followed, “the 91” became the shorthand used in media and Congressional discussion to refer to the “Lavender menace” that threatened the United States of America.

Sarah: Just as a bit of context – 91 is quite a lot, when you consider that there were just around 1400 total employees of the executive branch of the government in 1950. That’s spread across the department of defense, the department of agriculture, the department of health, Education, and welfare, and the departments of the treasury, interior, and veterans. So 91 from one department is quite a lot over three years.

Averill: The State Department was given a sort of carte blanche to intimidate and fire potential “security threats” shortly after the Iron Curtain fell in Europe. In 1947, the Appropriations committee added the “McCarran” rider to the appropriations bill for the state department, which permitted the secretary of state to “dismiss any employee in his absolute discretion as he deemed such action advisable in the interest of national security.”^[16] The committee followed up yearly to ensure that the rider was being enforced – and, as Peurifoy noted in a public hearing in 1950, it certainly was, though almost exclusively in forcing the resignation of “sexual perverts.”

Sarah:  Starting from the February 1950 “revelation” that there were a startling number of queer State Department employees who’d been forced to resign – and an unknown number yet to be discovered – the Lavender Scare seized national and congressional attention. Shortly after  the undersecretary of state shared the “91” number, Representative Clare Hoffman (R-Michigan) claimed that his constituents were more concerned about the “homosexual” than communism. “They are concerned before they get to the issue of communism or loyalty with this issue of morality and decency.”^[17] From late March to May of 1950, Senator Kenneth Wherry, a Republican, and Senator J. Lister Hill, a Democrat, began an intensive investigation into the homosexual threat to America. The evidence they collected was lost or destroyed. All we have is media coverage of the investigation, and two published reports, one from each Senator. 

Averill: The head of the DC Metropolitan Police Department’s vice squad claimed that 5,000 homosexuals lived in DC, and that 3,200 were federal employees. This was an estimate, pure speculation, but seized upon by the press and Wherry and Hill. Wherry and Hill, like the Appropriations committee, were insistent that homosexuals in the government opened the government up to infiltration by communists. As Wherry put it, “Only the most naïve could believe that the Communists’ fifth column in the United States would neglect to propagate and use homosexuals to gain their treacherous ends.” Wherry and Hill convinced the Senate that they needed to undertake a comprehensive investigation of “the alleged employment by the departments and agencies of the Government of homosexuals and other moral perverts.”

Sarah: So in June 1950, Senator Clyde Hoey, chairman of the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, was joined by Democrats James Eastland, John McClellan, and Herbert O’Conor and Republicans Karl Mundt, Andrew Schoeppel, and Margaret Chase Smith; they formed the “Hoey Committee” tasked with investigating the sexual lives of government employees. They never heard from any gay or lesbian employees, but instead gathered testimony from federal agencies, law enforcement, judicial authorities, and the medical community to try and understand homosexuality and its potential impact on the federal government. Several committee members considered Margaret Chase Smith’s presence an impediment; they wanted to ask more explicit questions about sex and sexual behavior, but “couldn’t” due to a woman’s presence. Because, of course, women can’t handle hearing about fellatio and anal sex. LOL.

Averill: They collected names of “suspected” homosexuals in federal agencies. They conducted surveys of government agencies to determine their existing policies for homosexual employees, to which most came out against “the suitability” of queer people for work in their offices. Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer declared: “The privilege of working for the United States Government should not be extended to persons of dubious moral character, such as homosexuals or sex perverts. The confidence of our citizenry in their Government would be severely taxed if we looked with tolerance upon the employment of such persons.”

Sarah: Some department heads were more moderate. Howard Colvin, acting director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, asserted that homosexuals could make good employees: “Since it is possible, according to our understanding of medical and psychiatric opinion on the subject, for a homosexual to lead a normal, well-adjusted life, we do not consider that such a person necessarily constitutes a bad security risk. We believe that each such case would have to be decided on its own merits.”

Averill: The investigation went on for months, held conferences with police officials in Baltimore, New York City, and Philadelphia, and called in “medical experts” to attest to the fitness and illness of homosexuals. Undoubtedly, the responses from medical experts were not as simply damning as some members of the committee hoped. Most psychiatrists and medical officers hedged. There was no simple test to determine if someone was a homosexual, nor any singular mental state that could be attested to homosexuality. Like any subset of the population, there were homosexuals who were mentally ill, and, as one psychiatrist put it, there were plenty more who were “well-adjusted.” Though the DSM would classify homosexuality as a mental illness in 1952, there was really no consensus among medical professionals to support that classification before 1952 or after.

Sarah: One of the outcomes of the Hoey investigation was that forced resignations could no longer be done quietly. Gay and lesbian federal employees who were “caught out” after 1950 were more likely to have “perversion” or “homosexuality” added to their record, making it near impossible to find suitable work elsewhere. And the opportunity for being caught increased as the homosexual panic increased after 1950. Milton Ladd, assistant to the director of the FBI, happily reported to the Hoey committee that the FBI had instructed police departments throughout the U.S “to indicate on any arrest fingerprint cards, the federal employment of the individuals arrested.” As National Archives writer Judith Adkins put it, “A man could be picked up in California for responding to an undercover vice officer’s suggestive remarks—and end up losing his government job 2,000 miles away in Washington, DC.”

Averill:  Following the Hoey Committee Investigation, Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450 in 1953, which facilitated federal discrimination against homosexuals for decades. In the state department, Peace corps and jobs corps – ‘liberal’ programs of the 1960s – still screened for homosexuals as late as the 1970s.^[18] 

Sarah: Why these state-led crusades happen matters, as much as documenting that they did happen (or are happening). There were undoubtedly politicians and church leaders who believed that the threat queer people posed to the heterogenous / white supremacist / Christian nationalist ideal was bad. No doubt. Clearly there are ignorant, narrow-minded people who truly believe that now. Who fear that if we poke holes in the rigid box of what is “normal”, then the whole thing will collapse. Who think that human and civil rights are a pie that is divided, and if we give rights to non-white, non-hetero, non-cis gender people, that the white/hetero/cis people will get fewer rights. That’s, of course, not how rights work.

Averill: That is how power – and wealth – works. And the people with power and wealth have convinced the people without that the fight is over rights, to distract from their power-grabbing and wealth-hoarding. So certainly, for some of these crusaders, targeting gay men and women was a distraction. Inventing an internal enemy – Communists, homosexuals, Jews, trans people, immigrants – and the ways that they will “harm” the “good” citizen is a tale as old as time. It’s a particularly popular tactic among fascist regimes and dictatorships. If the masses are occupied with an imaginary battle against “moral” enemies, they won’t pay attention to the real arbiters of suffering.

Sarah: So this is a pretty shitty situation for queer people at mid century, especially if they had aspirations to work in the civil service, to serve in the Peace Corps or Jobs Corps, or serve their country. They either had to resign themselves to an unhappy life pretending to conform to the newly enshrined social and sexual standards, or face blackballing or dishonorable discharge, ruining their futures and limiting their employment options indefinitely.

Averill: That was the case for Frank Kameny, an astronomer for the Army Map Service. Kameny was a spitfire. He was born in 1925 to Jewish parents in New York City. His dad was an electrical engineer and his mom a secretary. He was accepted to college at the age of 16, CUNY, for physics. At 17 he told his parents he was an atheist, and in his early 20s told them he was gay. He recalled as a 20-something calling his mother up at one point and telling her that he was who he was, that the world was wrong about what that meant, not him, and that he would prove it eventually. During WW2, he enlisted under the Army Specialized Training Program, and was sent to University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana to learn electrical engineering. After the war he earned his PhD from Harvard in 1956. That same year, he was arrested in San Francisco after he was seen by a peeping cop having sex with another adult man. He was detained. The San Francisco municipal court offered Kameny the option to plead guilty and accept a $55 fine and 6-months probation. He accepted – a mistake he’d never make again – and the next year he got a job with the Army Map Service. When his employer learned he’d been arrested for consensual sexual contact with another man, he was fired, and then barred from future employment by the federal government under the terms of Executive Order 10450.

Sarah: Most of the men and women who’d resigned or been fired between 1947-1957 did not fight back. Their family situations or other personal circumstances likely meant that being outed publicly in the process of appealing their dismissal was too dangerous or potentially damaging. But as David Johnson discovered when he talked to Frank Kameny, the tenacious young man was unwilling to sit back and let his life be ruled by bigotry. For months after his termination, he wrote letters to try and change his circumstances.

“Dear Mr. Secretary. I continue to apply for jobs in your department, only to be told that I’m “well-qualified”, but that government policy will not allow my employment. All I ask is for you to consider me as an individual. I am ready, willing and able to be of service to our country, and I appeal to you to give me the chance to do so. Most sincerely yours, Dr. Franklin E. Kameny.”^[19]

In 1961, after his appeal failed, he founded a Washington DC chapter of the Mattachine Society with Jack Nichols. Though he wasn’t a lawyer, he consumed legal briefs and case law so that he could represent himself and any other queer federal employee who was dismissed because of their sexuality. He led a charge to fight back against the discrimination that he and thousands of others had suffered.

Averill: Kameny was the first that we know of who fought back. One reason he was able to was because he was fired – he didn’t resign under the pressure of investigation, like so many before him. And in trying to appeal for public support, he framed the issue as an infringement on civil rights. Morality, a subjective framework, was irrelevant. He shot down claims that homosexuals were susceptible to blackmail or that they were communists. In 1960s Washington DC, civil rights was the language of resistance. He filed the first gay rights appeal to the US Supreme Court. Every 4th of July from 1965 to 1969, he and Craig Rodwell led the “Annual Reminders” – a public demonstration for gay equality, marching outside of Independence Hall. He and Barbara Gittings convinced activists from New York, DC, and Philadelphia to join the demonstrations, carrying signs demanding equality. After Stonewall, they suspended their DC march to instead join the Christopher Street march commemorating the Stonewall Riots.

Sarah: With Barbara Gittings, Kameny waged a multi-year campaign against the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for its classification of homosexuality as a mental illness. They disrupted annual meetings, organized panels for the APA annual meeting, until the APA finally removed homosexuality as a mental illness from the DSM in 1973. Common “treatment” for homosexuality from the 1950s through the 1970s included electric shock therapy, long-term institutionalization, and even lobotomies. So for many, it was too late. But for those who came after, there was hope.

Averill: Jamie Shoemaker grew up in Kentucky and graduated from the University of Louisville, where he studied a variety of languages, including French, German, Spanish, and Russian. He wanted to pursue a career in language and linguistics, so his brother suggested that he look into NSA. In 1974, he was hired as a language analyst working on high priority missions. While studying at the NSA’s Foreign Language Institute, the students were encouraged to speak about their lives in the target language for practice. During these conversations, Shoemaker was open with his classmates about being gay. Though we don’t know for sure if one of his classmates or someone else listening keyed on this, the results were the same: he’d come out as gay, and he was in a high security clearance position, and per federal policy, that wasn’t allowed.

The fallout didn’t take long. Shoemaker remembered it this way: “I was sitting at my desk at NSA. My supervisor came around, tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You’re wanted in security.” And sitting there are several officials. “We understand you’re leading a gay lifestyle.” And they took my badge, and they told me that I can’t be gay and work there at the same time. So immediately, when I got home that night, I called up Dr. Franklin Kameny. I’d read about him and I knew that he took on cases like this. So, I identified myself on the phone. I told him what had happened. And there was a silence there. And then, all of a sudden, boom! He said, “How could you possibly have said anything to them about anything! You should not have let them take your badge! Why didn’t you hold onto it? Why didn’t you keep your mouth shut! Never, never say anything.” And, oh my gosh, I was just like rattling on the phone, listening to this. But after he calmed down, then he said, “You are not gonna say another thing to the agency. I am now your effective counselor. It’s in my hands. Don’t worry.” And immediately, he’s firing off letters to the agency.”^[20]

Sarah: Kameny was an astronomer and physicist, not a lawyer. But in the two decades since he’d lost his own job, he’d become a dab hand at challenging the federal government and other professional agencies over discrimination. Kameny got himself and Shoemaker a meeting with NSA leadership. They met with Admiral Inman, who said Shoemaker could keep his job if he agreed to abide by certain conditions, including “telling his family, abiding by the laws of the jurisdiction where he lived concerning public conduct, and not getting involved in public activities which may compromise NSA’s anonymity policy”. Shoemaker agreed, and became the first NSA employee to successfully challenge and circumvent anti-homosexual policies of the federal government.

 

Averill: Despite the small victories won by Kameny and his comrades, and the larger queer and trans rights movements across the country in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, change ground out very slowly. Suspected or openly queer people continued to be denied security clearances and promotions and jobs into the 1990s. In 1995 Clinton finally issued an EO that countered 10450, ending the legal discrimination against federal employees on the basis of sexuality – at least, in the civil service. But Clinton’s official overwriting of EO 10450 in 1995 only smoothed the way for queer people in Civil Service. Let’s not forget that the year before he reaffirmed these prejudices against queer people in the military with the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell prohibited the military administration from asking a soldier about their sexuality, but any who dared to disclose that they were gay, bisexual, or lesbian could be (and usually was) discharged. Each victory was celebrated, but Kameny and the other advocates and activists fighting discrimination could not let up, back down, or become complacent just because they got one guy his job back or convinced the APA to stop calling same-sex desire a mental illness. It was – and continues to be, unfortunately – an on-going struggle for civil rights. 

Sarah: President Obama signed legislation allowing gay people to serve openly in the US military in 2010. For the thousands who were dishonorably discharged during WW2 and on because of their sexuality, it was too little too late, of course. And the thousands since 1995 who were forced by their EMPLOYER to be closeted. In June 2024, BIDEN issued a pardon for all the queer members of the military who were dishonorably discharged for violating Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which prohibited soldiers from having sex with anyone of the same sex. Really too little too late. As of September 2024, only eight people had applied for the pardon – in part because it only applied to those military court convictions, and not the hundreds or thousands who were forced out on a variety of trumped-up charges and threats. The damage was already done. The pardon is too little too late. But it is, ultimately, closer to what we want – acknowledgment of and reparations for harm done, and a way to move forward. The current administration, of course, is making that hard. But he and his cronies are temporary.

Averill: 47’s executive orders, which are absurd and fucked up and dangerous, are outgrowths of the Heritage Foundation’s incorporation of religious extremism in this country, and the Repbublican party’s mobilization of anti-XYZ rhetoric – and by that I mean rhetoric that targets various vulnerable populations and try to deny reality, which conservatives use as scapegoats and dog whistles to rally the frightened, selfish, delusional, and hateful members of our political society. Anti-XYZ includes anti-immigrant, anti-Black, anti-Brown, anti-women, anti-queer, anti-science, anti-Muslim, anti-semitic, and, obviously, anti-trans – any and all populations and communities they can target to create a war that pits those without power or money (the poor, working, and middle classes) against each other, so that those in power stay in power and continue to bleed the havenots dry, increasing the wealth gap and profiting off our pain and starvation. Conservative policy proposals are nonsensical, because they don’t protect anyone or improve the economy or make America better. They just target the vulnerable, exploit workers, and make the rich richer. Smarter people than me have been writing and talking about this for decades, so I’m going to end this rant now. But if you haven’t read Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, do; if you aren’t subscribed to Heather Cox Richardson’s substack, subscribe; if you don’t know about The Pink Triangle Legacies Project, hit follow on their socials; if you aren’t listening to Ijeoma Oluo.  

Sarah: Suffice it to say that we have been here before. Conservatives have long used moral and geopolitical fear-mongering to distract the masses from their own subjugation and to render our democracy impotent. In the 1950s, the targets were “homosexuals” and “Communists.” Then, as now, there were those who saw through this bullshit. But the fight can’t just fall on the shoulders of members of the targeted communities. We have to stand up for the vulnerable. I know you feel beaten down and demoralized. I know it fucking sucks to wake up every day and see in the news what horrible thing 47 has done today, who he has put in danger, what fucking hateful cult member has decided to carry these prejudices to their logical violent conclusion. The constant barrage of shittyness is intentional. It’s death by a thousand cuts; if we don’t find ways to be resilient, to keep our heads and hearts strong, to link arm in arm and keep fighting, hate will win. If we don’t push back, hold the line, and instead succumb to the death that is apathy, too many people will suffer and die. I know it’s hard. But we can’t give up. We can’t abandon our trans, immigrant, unwantedly pregnant, and Black and Brown friends, family, neighbors, and strangers. The arc of the moral universe only bends towards justice if we, the people, stand up against the injustices. 

Averill: What I think is important to remember about EO 10450, the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, and all the rest of this story is that resistance, eventually, worked. It took decades, many lives were ruined or harmed. There is no denying that as true. But when enough people stand up against the corrupt, philandering con artists, we win. So don’t let the barrage of bullshit overwhelm you – because that’s what they’re counting on, that if they throw enough at us to cause chaos and overwhelm us, we’ll shut down and give up. But we can’t. We have to keep writing letters and calling and faxing our representatives. We have to march. We have to canvas for progressive candidates. We have to support each other. We have to celebrate victories when we get them, mourn the losses, and then dust ourselves off and get back to work. In whatever way you can resist, resist. In whatever way you can help, help. Frank Kameny and Johnnie Phelps didn’t give up. Neither can we.

We stand in solidarity with queer and trans people everywhere.

Don’t let your rage burn you out. Let it set the world on fire.

 

Bibliography

Allan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

Julian Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940 (Duke University Press, 2007).

Josh Howard, The Lavender Scare, (Alexander Street Films).

John Howard, Men Like That: Southern Queer History, (University of Chicago Press, 1999).

David K. Johnson, “The Lavender Scare: Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Civil Service,” PhD Diss, (Northwestern University, 2000).

Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (University of North Carolina Press, 2008)

Elizabeth L. Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (Routledge, 1993).

Anna Lvovsky, Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall, (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

And these stupid things:

Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government – The White House

Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness – The White House

Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports 

 

^[1] Allan Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II, (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) 269.

^[2] David K. Johnson, “The Lavender Scare: Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Civil Service,” PhD Diss, (Northwestern University, 2000), 8-12.

^[3] Julian Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940 (Duke University Press, 2007).

^[4] Berube, Coming out Under Fire, 256.

^[5] Elizabeth L. Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (Routledge, 1993).

^[6] E. Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (University of North Carolina Press, 2008); and John Howard, Men Like That: Southern Queer History, (University of Chicago Press, 1999).

^[7] Berube, Coming Out Under Fire, 257.

^[8] Berube, Coming Out Under Fire, 259.

^[9] Johnson, The Lavender Scare, 3.

^[10] Johnson, The Lavender Scare, 6.

^[11] Qtd. in Johnson, The Lavender Scare, 2.

^[12] Johnson, The Lavender Scare, 5.

^[13] Anna Lvovsky, Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall, (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

^[14] Qtd. in David K. Johnson, “The Lavender Scare: Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Civil Service,” PhD Diss, (Northwestern University, 2000), 1.  

^[15] Johnson, The Lavender Scare, 43.

^[16] Johnson, The Lavender Scare, 52.

^[17] Qtd. in Johnson, The Lavender Scare, 2-3.

^[18] Josh Howard, The Lavender Scare, (Alexander Street Films).

^[19] Howard, The Lavender Scare, (00:18).

^[20] Howard, The Lavender Scare, (1:03-1:05).