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“The question of how many people were fired doesn’t really even capture the extent to which this affected people’s lives,” says Josh Howard, the filmmaker of the 2017 documentary The Lavender Scare, which was based on Johnson’s book. Johnson estimates that somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 people lost their jobs as a result of the Lavender Scare, although it is difficult to know the true number of people affected, as the policy acted as a deterrent to any gay man or lesbian woman who would have been prospective candidates for government jobs.Īccording to a 1983 oral history interview with drag king Rusty Brown, who served in the Navy, the fear went even beyond Washington, permeating the entertainment industry in Hollywood and the bars and nightclubs in New York City, as people were afraid they would be fired if their employers found out they were gay. Employees were questioned without an attorney, in what many described as an invasive experience where they were asked intimate questions about their private sexual lives.ĭuring research for his book, Johnson found many examples of employees who “voluntarily resigned” after they had been interrogated, and others who took their own lives. “It’s a classic case of scapegoating,” says Johnson.Įvery government employee was subject to a security investigation, and sometimes the impact could be devastating.
The Lavender Scare tied these notions together, conflating gay people with communists and alleging they could not be trusted with government secrets and labelling them as security risks, even though there was no evidence to prove this. The political and moral fears about alleged subversives became intertwined with a backlash against homosexuality, as gay and lesbian culture had grown in visibility in the post-war years. “It’s important to remember that the Cold War was perceived as a kind of moral crusade,” says Johnson, whose 2004 book The Lavender Scare popularized the phrase and is widely regarded as the first major historical examination of the policy and its impact. And while American students might learn more about the Red Scare or study McCarthyism in school, Johnson says that without learning about the Lavender Scare, they’re only hearing part of the story. Joseph McCarthy’s fear-mongering “Red Scare” campaign in the early 1950s, which targeted alleged subversive communists working in the federal government, thousands of government employees were forced out of their jobs as a result of the anti-gay policy. According to him, this aspect of American history has largely been overlooked. Known as the “ Lavender Scare,” the policy was based on the unfounded fear that gay men and lesbians “posed a threat to national security because they were vulnerable to blackmail and were considered to have weak moral characters,” says historian David K. Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, the investigation, interrogation and systematic removal of gay men and lesbians from the federal government became policy. What happened to Shoemaker in 1980 was the continuation of a policy launched nearly 30 years earlier, in 1953.