History
Book Records U.S. Government’s Persecution of Gays
Political Perversity Surfaces in Newly Declassified
Documents
Cold War Chronicle Published by University of Chicago
Press
Gay
Today, December 31, 2003
http://gaytoday.com/events/123103ev.asp
By Jack Nichols
Washington,
D.C.—Advance
reviews of Dr. David K. Johnson’s newly-published history, The Lavender
Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government
(University of Chicago Press) are laudatory. Historian George Chauncey, author
of Gay New York, writes that Dr. Johnson’s “riveting account of how the
federal government ferreted out and purged its gay employees in the 1940s and
‘50s is based on exhaustive research and careful analysis.”
Professor Chauncey, who teaches American history at the
University of Chicago, believes that The Lavender Scare “definitively
establishes the central role antihomosexual politics played in the domestic
Cold War and provocatively argues that this hostility drew on public anxieties
about the rapid expansion of the federal government during the New Deal and
Second World War.”
“After this remarkable book,” says Dr. Chauncey,
“we will never be able to view the McCarthy Era the same way again.”
David K. Johnson, Ph.D., is currently a visiting
professor at the University of South Florida. He has also taught U.S. History
at Roosevelt University and Northwestern University. The McCarthy era, a
period he has unearthed following the recent declassification of fifty-year
old government documents, is generally considered the worst period of
political repression in recent American history.
While the famous question, “Are you now or have you
ever been a member of the Communist Party? resonated in the halls of Congress,
security officials were posing another question at least as frequently, if
more discreetly: “Information has come to the attention of the Civil Service
Commission that you are a homosexual. What comment do you care to make?”
The Lavender Scare relates the frightening, untold story
of how, during the Cold War, gay men and lesbians were considered as dangerous
a threat to national security as Communists. Charges that the Democratic
Roosevelt and Truman administrations were havens for homosexuals proved a
potent political weapon, sparking a “Lavender Scare” more vehement and
long-lasting than McCarthy’s Red Scare.
Relying not only on newly declassified documents, Dr.
Johnson has also been engaged in years of research in the records of the
national Archives and the FBI. He has interviewed former civil servants who
were mistreated by the government and has recreated the vibrant gay subculture
that flourished in New Deal-era Washington.
Dr. Johnson takes readers inside the security
investigation rooms where thousands of Americans were questioned about their
sex lives.
These anti-gay purges ended promising careers, ruined
lives, and pushed many to suicide. But as Dr. Johnson also shows, the purges
brought victims together to protest their treatment, helping to launch a new
civil rights movement.
The Lavender Scare shatters the myth that homosexuality
has only recently become a national political issue. While it upends popular
misconceptions about the McCarthy era, it also challenges previous conceptions
about the origins of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement.
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