Donald Trump has repeatedly called the multiple investigations into his campaign’s ties to the Russian government “the greatest witch hunt in political history.”
While there are multiple examples proving the president is incorrect, chief among them is the “lavender scare,” Senator Joseph McCarthy’s parallel to the “Red Scare” which insisted that Communists had infiltrated the government in the 1950s.
McCarthy’s “lavender scare” asserted that homosexuals had also infiltrated the government, and that gay men and lesbians posed a serious threat to national security, as they could be blackmailed to provide the enemy with government secrets. It resulted in a systematic campaign to identify and remove all government employees suspected of homosexuality, though the homophobic purge is not widely discussed.
The Lavender Scare, a new documentary, aims to change that.
The film began as a pet project of producer and director Josh Howard, raising $60,605 from 362 backers on Kickstarter.com. The filmmaker has won 24 Emmy Awards for his work on CBS News’ 60 Minutes, amongst other programs, and has served as the vice-president of long form programming for CNBC.
The Lavender Scare is based on historian David K. Johnson’s book of the same name, which left Howard the desire to expose on film the “shameful witch hunt that targeted gay and lesbian federal workers and gave birth to the LGBT rights movement.”
“I came across the book The Lavender Scare completely by accident,” the filmmaker has said. “I was stunned as I was reading it. I thought I had a pretty good understanding of America in the 1950s… the Cold War, the McCarthy era, the ‘Red Scare,’ as it was known. But what was remarkable to me was reading the story… and finding out there was a whole aspect of this time period that I knew nothing about.”
The documentary details President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s executive order that officially prohibited gays and lesbians for working for the federal government, one of his first actions after assuming the presidency in 1953. The practice wouldn’t be changed until President Bill Clinton’s executive order banning discrimination based on sexual orientation for government employees in 1995, restoring access. to classified information.
“More than 10,000 federal employees lost their jobs,” Howard said. “It is without question the most widespread and longest-lasting witch hunt in American history. It was just amazing to me that such an important part of our history had been completely overlooked.”
The film features chilling but fascinating interviews with a number of former federal employees who were fired from their positions in the government, and even more heartbreaking, with family members of former employees who’d committed suicide in response to the homophobic witch hunt.
Howard and his team also spoke with former high-ranking governmental employees who had conducted the witch hunts, ruining lives in the process. “We spent a good part of our time identifying homosexuals,” one former security agent told the filmmaker during an interview. “We looked at every part of the person’s life… it was an extensive investigation, just like a police department investigating murders, this type of thing… you had to put little pieces together.”
“In front of a skilled questioner,” he continued, “homosexuals would very easily admit that they were homosexual, because of the guilt that they feel. Most of the time, they would resign on the spot – others would not resign, so we had to bring removal charges against them.”
But with the infuriating comes the inspiring. The Lavender Scare also focuses largely on Harvard-trained astronomer Dr. Frank Kameny, who worked for the U.S. Army. Kameny is now referred to by many as the “grandfather of the gay rights movement,” and was the first (or certainly the foremost) gay man to publicly fight his dismissal. He would go on to form the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Mattachine Society, an advocacy group dedicated to ensuring equality.
Two years prior to his death in 2011, Kameny attended President Barack Obama’s repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the 44th president’s signing of the expansion of benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees, some of which the documentary highlights. The late icon was given the president’s pen.
Howard has called the film a tribute to Kameny and the other early leaders of the LGBT movement, “whose sacrifices and commitment made the world a better place for generations of LGBT people who followed.”
“This story is a classic tale of both tragedy and triumph,” the director said. “Tragedy because thousands of lives were ruined during the 1950s and ’60s… but there was triumph, too, because that heartache ignited a sense of outrage in the gay community that really helped spark the early days of the gay rights movement.”
The film was nominated for Best Documentary for the New Renaissance Film Festival in Amsterdam, and was the audience runner-up for Best Documentary in 2017’s Out Shine Film Festival. It was the official selection for the 2017 Inside Out Toronto Film Festival, the 2017 Sun Valley Film Festival and Newport Beach’s Film Festival. It also won Best Documentary for New Jersey’s qFest, their LGBT Film and Video Festival.
The Lavender Scare is expected to be screened at the 28th annual Tampa Bay International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (TIGLFF) this year, currently scheduled for October 6-14 with a kick-off party on September 16.
