In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s incendiary allegations against the State Department led to a government purging that would eventually cost over a thousand people their jobs. These particular individuals, however, were not dismissed because of any direct ties that they had to the Communist Party, but instead because of their sexual orientation. McCarthy’s original accusations concerning the presence of over 200 Communists working in the government—specifically the State Department—included two allegations that specifically referenced homosexuality, suggesting that homosexuality was itself a danger to the security of the United States. Even as McCarthy—cognizant of growing pressure from his colleagues for him to produce evidence of his claims—reduced his original allegations from 205 card-carrying communists to 57 “bad risks” (Johnson 2004), the public conception of the threat of homosexuality in the government persisted and ultimately materialized into the Lavender Scare, a mass hysteria that paralleled and was concurrent with the Red Scare. Capitol Hill, with the nation alongside it, was quickly overtaken by this Lavender Tide. Soon, fear of a homosexual presence in the government surpassed even fears of communism. Unlike its Red counterpart, however, the Lavender Scare is virtually unknown to the general public even though it eventually exceeded the Red Scare in scope. The Orientalizing rhetoric and propaganda directed at homosexuals during the Lavender Scare, however, reveals a notion that existed during the Lavender Scare of homosexuals as un-American. This “othering” of gays and lesbians combined with the period’s strong American Exceptionalism suggests a motive behind the strong homophobic reaction of this period, ...
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.... The lavender scare: The Cold War persecution of gays and lesbians in the federal government. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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In Vicki L. Eaklor’s Queer America, the experiences of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people in the years since the 1970s gay liberation movement are described as a time of transformation and growth. The antigay movement, threatened, now more than ever, created numerous challenges and obstacles that are still prevalent today. Many of the important changes made associated with the movement were introduced through queer and queer allied individuals and groups involved in politics. Small victories such as the revision of the anti discrimination statement to include “sexual orientation”, new propositions regarding the Equal Rights Amendment and legalized abortion, were met in turn with growing animosity and resistance from individuals and groups opposed to liberal and
Historian David Carter, provides an intriguing in-depth look into the historical impact of the Stonewall Riots in Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution. This engaging book adds to the genre of sexual orientation discrimination. Carter extensively analyzes the various factors that played a role in igniting the Stonewall riots and the historical impact that the riots had on the Gay Revolution and movement for gay equality. Through the use of interviews, newspapers, and maps, Carter argues that the riots were a product of many geographical, social, political, and cultural factors. Carter further argues that the riots ultimately led to the forming of the Gay Revolution and caused sexual orientation to be a protected category in the growing movement for civil rights. Carter’s book provides a well-structured argument, supported mainly by primary evidence, into the different factors that contributed to the riots as well as a detailed account of the events that transpired during the riots and the political attitudes towards homosexuality in America during this time.
In his work about gay life in New York City, George Chauncey seeks to dispel the various myths about the gay lifestyle before the Civil Rights era of the 60’s. He distills the misconceptions into three major myths: “…isolation, invisibility, and internalization” (Chauncey 1994, 2). He believes a certain image has taken in the public mind where gays did not openly exist until the 60’s, and that professional historians have largely ignored this era of sexual history. He posits such ideas are simply counterfactual. Using the city of New York, a metropolitan landscape where many types of people confluence together, he details a thriving gay community. Certainly it is a community by Chauncey’s reckoning; he shows gay men had a large network of bar, clubs, and various other cultural venues where not only gay men intermingled the larger public did as well. This dispels the first two principle myths that gay men were isolated internally from other gay men or invisible to the populace. As to the internalization of gay men, they were not by any degree self-loathing. In fact, Chauncey shows examples of gay pride such a drag queen arrested and detained in police car in a photo with a big smile (Chauncey 1994, 330). Using a series of personal interviews, primary archival material from city repositories, articles, police reports, and private watchdog groups, Chauncey details with a preponderance of evidence the existence of a gay culture in New York City, while at the same time using secondary scholarship to give context to larger events like the Depression and thereby tie changes to the gay community to larger changes in the society.
The prejudice of both modern military policy and the Salem witch trials is built on the misconceptions and stereotypes of the accused. The belief that gay men are feminine shorts-wearing, roller skaters invested with AIDS [McGowan 13] and the perceived image of a sex-driven gay contrasts the military’s “bastion of...
Johnson, David K. The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2006. Print.
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In the past decades, the struggle for gay rights in the Unites States has taken many forms. Previously, homosexuality was viewed as immoral. Many people also viewed it as pathologic because the American Psychiatric Association classified it as a psychiatric disorder. As a result, many people remained in ‘the closet’ because they were afraid of losing their jobs or being discriminated against in the society. According to David Allyn, though most gays could pass in the heterosexual world, they tended to live in fear and lies because they could not look towards their families for support. At the same time, openly gay establishments were often shut down to keep openly gay people under close scrutiny (Allyn 146). But since the 1960s, people have dedicated themselves in fighting for
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Mara Mayor. "Fears and Fantasies of the anti-Suffragists," Connecticut Review 7, no. 2 (April 1974), pp. 64-74.
· Emphasis on coming out and gay rights. They expected and demanded acceptance for who they were.
The persecution of homosexuals during this age of McCarthy proved exactly how vulnerable they were to attack and discrimination. Out of those persecutions came some of the first organized “gay rights” groups, known as Homophile organizations, the first two being the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilibis (who focused their efforts on Lesbian rights). Founded in 1950 by Harry Hay, the...
The Lavender Scare was an event (corresponding to the Cold War), where unjustified fear, mass incarceration, and repression of homosexual people (specifically gay men) was eminent. The scare resulted in numerous unemployment (specifically from government jobs), suicides, and an immense drop in the quality of life for homosexual citizens. The Lavender Scare coincides with the Red Scare primarily since society perceived homosexuality equally as menacing as communism (Troops 95). Additionally, society perceived the gay men as former communist (Johnson).
In the 1940s, homophobia was extremely prevalent in the United States. People who were openly gay were often stigmatized. “Homosexuality was discussed as ‘an aspect of three personality disorders: psychopaths who were sexual perverts, paranoid personalities who suffered from homosexual panic, and schizoid personalities’ who displayed gay symptoms” (Kaiser 29). Many regulations and practices discriminated against gays. The military found homosexuality to be a direct threat to strength and safety of the U.S. government and the American people, in general. In 1941 the Army and the Selective Service banned homosexuals from participation in the war (Kaiser 29). All major religions considered it sinful and throughout the country, more and more people found it to be immoral. Life was hard for homosexuals in the early and mid-twentieth century. They were forced to hide their sexuality in order to escape derision or imprisonment.
Halperin, David. "Is There a History of Sexuality?." The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry
...n American Literature. By Henry Louis. Gates and Nellie Y. McKay. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2004. 387-452. Print.