The Lavender Scare

David K. Johnson's 2004 book, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government, provides the basis for Josh Howard's namesake documentary, produced by Pbs. Johnson's rich and compelling book extensively documents how postwar concerns about American moral decline, combined with fears of communism, enabled a powerful class of government bureaucrats to employ a “Lavender Scare to justify a vast expansion of the national security state” (p. 10). Because of the job opportunities fostered first by the New Deal's vast expansion of government programs and then by the war effort, Washington became a mecca for gay people. In the capital, they could live a life-style free from the stigmatizing normativity that informed their upbringing across the spectra of American cities and towns. Finding themselves among kindred spirits, they reveled in the city's social as well as professional opportunities. After the war, however, everything fell apart when the strategies for containing communism merged foreign policy and domestic surveillance with fear of nonconformity, in an atmosphere where social deviance as much as political deviance could be read as vulnerability to subversion. As James Gilbert and K. A. Courdileone, among others, have shown, this state of heightened postwar security accompanied a national insecurity about masculinity. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in The Vital Center (1949), decried the flaccid character of liberals, while C. Wright Mills identified the burgeoning class of white collar workers as “little men” (White Collar, 1951), and the 1948 Kinsey report asserted that over one third of American men had had homosexual experiences (Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, p. 623). To the extent that both male and female homosexuals posed an ostensive challenge to masculine norms, therefore, they implicitly deprived the postwar security state of what had become its most pervasive litmus test: conformity

Communism · Lesbian · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law