EP 156: The Lavender Scare

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the Lavender Scare, a roughly forty-year period in history (spanning from the late-1940s and into the early-1990s) in which thousands of government employees lost their job as part of a federal anti-gay policy. Under Executive Order 10450 issued in 1953, it became a legal policy to remove all known gay men and women from federal service because it was believed that homosexuals have a proclivity for weakness and would therefore pose a threat to national security if they remained in their positions within the government.

We all know about Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare that he set off with his infamous congressional speech about the list of communists he claimed to know worked for the government. But alongside that scare, lesser known than that scare, was the Lavender Scare. As Senator Alan K. Simpson later wrote of it, “The so-called ‘Red Scare’ has been the main focus of most historians of that period of time. A lesser-known element and one that harmed far more people was the witch-hunt McCarthy and others conducted against homosexuals.”

And while McCarthyism is generally associated with the 1940s and 1950s, the Lavender Scare went far beyond that with one federal employee telling about his experience in 1980! Jamie Shoemaker was called into his boss’ office at the National Security Agency in 1980 where “...they said ‘we understand you’re leading a gay lifestyle. And I remember saying, ‘well, I didn’t think I was leading it, but yes, I’m gay.’" He was then placed on leave for four months while his bosses hemmed and hawed about what they were going to do…all to eventually fire him for his sexual orientation…nearly thirty years after the Executive Order had first been put into place!

I find this topic to be fascinating – and also, obviously, brutal and disgusting – but fascinating because it is a lesser known part of history…and yet it is wrapped up in the larger picture of a very well known part of history; that being, McCarthyism and the Red Scare.

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