(Photo courtesy of the Washington Historical Society)
President Joe Biden issued a formal proclamation April 26 on the 70th anniversary of the Lavender Scare, a moral panic that caused investigations and firings of thousands of known or suspected gay men and lesbians who were working for the U.S. government.
“For so many members of the LGBTQI+ community, hate, discrimination, and isolation throughout our country’s history have denied them the full promise of America,” Biden said. “The Lavender Scare epitomized — and institutionalized — this injustice.”
The president said “we must reflect honestly on the darkest chapters of our story” to continue building on the “tremendous progress” that has been made since the Lavender Scare.
At the same time, he said, “the struggle for equal justice is not over” for LGBTQ people in America, noting the “wave of discriminatory laws that target them — especially transgender children — and that echo the hateful stereotypes and stigma” encountered by gay men and lesbians during the Cold War era
Beginning with the State Department’s purge of gay and lesbian employees in 1947, which was codified across the federal government by an executive order from President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953, the Lavender Scare presaged and then paralleled the anti-communist McCarthyist crusades.
The senator himself was prone to using often-unsubstantiated allegations of homosexuality or communist sympathies to smear political opponents, once proclaiming, “If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you’ve got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker.”
Conflating homosexuality with communism, or with harboring sympathies to communist foreign adversaries, was common at the time. Ultimately, though, a greater number of people would be fired over their known or suspected sexual orientation.
At a time when homosexuality was considered a mental illness and most gay and lesbian Americans were closeted, victims of the Lavender Scare often took their own lives after suffering public disgrace and rejection by their families and communities.
However, the homophobic moral panic also helped to spurn a then-nascent movement for LGBTQ civil rights.
After he was fired for being gay and declared ineligible for future employment in the federal government, the late activist Frank Kameny picketed at the White House to demand rights for gay rights and lesbians several years before the Stonewall Riots.
“In 2009,” Biden said, “I was proud to meet Frank Kameny in the Oval Office as President Obama and I officially expanded many Federal benefits to same-sex partners of Government employees.”
Eisenhower’s executive order barring gay men and lesbians from employment in the federal government was not rescinded until 1995, with exemptions carved out for the U.S. Armed Forces that persisted until the 2011 repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
The State Department continued investigations of employees for homosexuality into the 1990s, U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) noted in a 2016 letter calling for the agency to apologize.
A few months later, then-Secretary of State John Kerry addressed the Lavender Scare and the agency personnel who were harmed.
“On behalf of the department, I apologize to those who were impacted by the practices of the past and reaffirm the department’s steadfast commitment to diversity and inclusion for all our employees, including members of the LGBTQ community,” Kerry said.
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