The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government

by David K. Johnson

A new edition of a classic work of history, revealing the anti-homosexual purges of midcentury Washington. The basis for the acclaimed PBS documentary.

In The Lavender Scare, David K. Johnson tells the frightening story of how, during the Cold War, homosexuals were considered as dangerous a threat to national security as Communists. Charges that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were havens for homosexuals proved a potent political weapon, sparking a "Lavender Scare" more vehement and long-lasting than Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare. Drawing on declassified documents, years of research in the records of the National Archives and the FBI, and interviews with former civil servants, Johnson recreates the vibrant gay subculture that flourished in midcentury Washington and takes us inside the security interrogation rooms where anti-homosexual purges ruined the lives and careers of thousands of Americans. This enlarged edition of Johnson's classic work of history—the winner of numerous awards and the basis for an acclaimed documentary broadcast on PBS—features a new epilogue, bringing the still-relevant story into the twenty-first century.

"David Johnson's engrossing study of the persecution of gays and lesbians during the Cold War, complete with a comprehensive picture of the gay culture that flourished in Washington, is an important addition to a subject all too often ignored." — Dallas Morning News
"A heart-wrenching reminder that homosexuals faced brutal employment discrimination and endless police hostility." — Los Angeles Times
"Detailed, accurate, fair-minded [it] deserves to stand on the shelf next to  The Great Fear  by David Caute and should be studied by everyone who is interested in the McCarthy era and its implications." — Times Literary Supplement

Genres: History, Nonfiction, LGBT, Queer, Politics, American History, Historical

291 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

For the Philosophy writer, see David Kyle Johnson

David K. Johnson is an award-winning historian and author. His first book, "The Lavender Scare" was made into a documentary film that garnered best documentary awards at over a dozen film festival. His book, "Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement", chronicles the rise of a gay commercial network in the 1950s and 1960s. Featured in a "starred review" in Publishers Weekly, it was released in February 2019 by Columbia University Press as part of its series on the History of U.S. Capitalism.

David earned a B.A.from Georgetown University and a Ph.D.from Northwestern University, both in history. He has enjoyed fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Social Science Research Council. As an associate professor in the History Department at the University of South Florida, he teaches courses on the post-1945 U.S. and the history of gender and sexuality.

Reviews

[Alok Vaid-Menon · Rating 3 out of 5]

We must contextualize the Trump administration’s targeting of trans people within the history of state-sanctioned scapegoating of queer people and political subterfuge. “The Lavender Scare” refers to a moral panic in the mid-20th century when gay men and lesbians were deemed a national security risk. This led to the firing of gay employees, the rampant criminalization of gay communities, as well as countless suicides. In 1953 President Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450 which barred gay people from working in the federal government, leading to thousands of people losing their jobs and being forcibly outed. Literature was created on how to identify homosexuals who were uniformly labeled as “sexual perverts.” This gave license to police as part of the “Pervert Elimination Campaign” to go undercover to catch people in cruising zones and gay bars. Kenneth Wherry, a Republican senator said: “Can you think of a person who could be more dangerous to the United States of America than a pervert?”

This witch-hunt relied on homophobic character assassination: officials asserted that because gays were “gregarious,” they were more “susceptible to blackmail.” They would refer to “nests” of homosexuals hiding in the US government. Gay people were discussed as a collectivity, never an individual the “homosexual clique,” “these gentlemen.” Officials maintained that gay people were emotionally unstable, selfish, and pathological in their desires. The police perpetuated the homophobic narrative that homosexuality was a learned behavior and justified their moral crusade in the name of protecting youth and the American public from perversion.

In this moment of hyper-nationalism, an antagonistic attitude of “either you’re with us, or against us” became enforced. Not just a “Communist” or “American,” but also a “heterosexual” or a “homosexual.” State politics were enmeshed with intimate lives. Prior to this moment gender non-conforming “fairies” were seen as the “true sexual deviant” because of their “conscious inversion of gender norms.” But in this juncture of history, gender conforming gays and lesbians were likened to them because of their sexual activity. Homosexual activity, which had not been as vehemently scorned previously, became seen as a marker of degeneracy. This is because as Johnson argues, “monogamous, heterosexual marriages were seen as a key weapon in the arsenal against internal subversion.” Diplomats were already wary of being framed to the public as “ineffectual and unmanly,” from pursuing negotiation rather than war. Excising the homosexuals was a recuperative gesture to maintain masculine power.

In response to this persecution, many middle-class gay people attempted to differentiate themselves from gender non-conforming people who were part of nightlife. They referred to these queers as “contrived,” “exaggerated,” “campy,” and wanted to hold on to respectability to protect their jobs. Some gays and lesbians pretended to be straight together. Some came out and joined the emerging gay liberation movement.

What we learn from this history is that the federal government fortifies gender norms during times of political instability as a policing tactic to foster division and evade culpability. Queers become seen as responsible for the ills of society, not the administration. We have to learn from history and come together to support trans people who continue to face the Lavender Scare.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

David K. Johnson's The Lavender Scare looks at the hidden side of the Red Scare, specifically the efforts by the US government to purge gay and lesbian employees. That thousands of bureaucrats and officials saw their careers ruined merely for existing remains a shamefully underreported chapter in American history. While Johnson's writing style is occasionally dry and academic, the fascinating content of his book makes up for it. Beyond sketching Washington's reputation, somewhat earned but often exaggerated, as a gay mecca during and immediately after WWII, Johnson demonstrates how easily Red hunters tied sexual "perversion" with political subversion. The excuse that gay and lesbian employees were security risks liable to blackmail, or just plain unreliable or unstable, became a self-fulfilling prophecy due to the era's mixture of political paranoia and sexual repression (the saga of Lester Hunt, the Wyoming Senator who committed suicide after his son was outed, is merely the best-known outgrowth of this tendency). Still, Johnson argues, some good belatedly emerged from this grim period, as the dispossession of thousands of intelligent, articulate and well-placed LGBTQ individuals laid the groundwork for the gay rights movement. Nonetheless, it remains a sadly relevant cautionary tale, showing how reactionary politics, sexual repression and rank bigotry can ruin lives, destroy people and turn an entire class into criminals.

[Linda ~ they got the mustard out! ~ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very informative, and very important history. Post WWII America was rife with paranoia, and not just because of Communism. The conservative cult got it in their heads that LGBT people working in the State Department were threats to national security since they could be blackmailed. So instead of removing the strictures putting them in jeopardy - or even just investigating if any actually had been blackmailed - they decided the best thing to do was terminate their employment. What starts in the State Department quickly branches out into other departments, and all levels of government employment on the state and federal levels, whether national security was involved or not.

Seeing the extremes that they went through to alienate, persecute and vilify LGBT peoples, often based on nothing but rumor, and whether it was linked to Communism or not, was infuriating. This was at a time when people still blindly trusted the government and didn't know they didn't have to answer questions or cooperate with investigations voluntarily. And knowing that even though strides have been made, that civil liberties and rights have been won, that attitudes have changed towards tolerance and then acceptance for the majority of American citizens, it's important to be reminded of where we came from and how we came to enjoy the protections we have now, because there are those who are still actively seeking to rip those rights and protections away.

Listening to this, I could see where Orwell got his ideas for 1984. It wasn't just the Communists screwing over their citizens, and these kinds of raids on people's homes and invasions into their private lives were happening in the UK as well as the US. For all they like to pretend otherwise, there was a lot more overlap in how the US and UK treated their LGBT populations and people of color and how dictators treated their citizens.

It's easy to forget about this stage in our history, since the TV shows and movies of this time didn't showcase this part of reality. The news only highlighted it to stir up more anger and paranoia, not to report facts, and the majority of the population had no sympathy for the hardships LGBT people faced - though there were still voices of reason that tried to speak up and get through the hysteria.

Johnson leaves this history when things start to turn around for the better, but there was still a long, hard battle ahead to get to where we are now.

[laurel [the suspected bibliophile] · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bit repetitive in places, but THEE authoritative work on the Lavender Scare of the 1950s.

[Tate Brombal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eye-opening and, at many points, riveting. It left my blood boiling but also inspired me — especially the segments on queer survival and resistance. So much has changed, yet so much is still the same.

[Rebecca Crunden]

⤑ research tag: in an effort to organise my shelves, I’m going to be labelling the books I’m using for study purposes as I tend to dip in and out of these.

Essential reading.

There’s also an interview with the author on the book here on the Teaching Tolerance: Queer America podcast.

See also: The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America.

[ken · Rating 3 out of 5]

wasn't going to write a review for this at first but then thought about it some more and you know what I Do Actually Have Some Thoughts. I read this book for school & found it severely lacking in that it focused mainly on white cis gay men and like. i get that because that was the majority demographic in the state department at this point but other lgbt people were treated as an afterthought so it did feel very strange for this author to argue "the gay purges of the lavender scare contributed to the formation of an organized LGBT rights movement, as shown by stonewall" when black & brown trans women were instrumental in that event. like. truly. what an oversight. i do feel like putting this entire argument into the context of the (racial) civil rights movement that was literally happening at the same time would have produced more fruitful discussion, instead of saving that conversation for the Very Last Chapter. UNRELATED but this author well & truly thought Mata Hari was a Japanese spy during WW2 which is quite honestly hilarious to me lol like it TRULY beats me how someone can be so wrong. anyway this review reads like a long-winded complaint but in actuality i did find this an interesting read, not super engaging (actually it got pretty annoyingly repetitive when detailing the political aspects of the purges), but all the anecdotes were very informative and tied neatly back to the author's main argument, and such a painful topic was, in my opinion, handled with careful elegance & grace.

[Ross Williamson]

nope this is too boring life is too short love and light ❤️

[Nate · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Lavender Scare’s first two chapters lay out the book’s premise and background. In the aftermath of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s famous declarations about communists in the State Department, department security officer John Peurifoy stated that 91 people had resigned from the State Department while under investigation as security risks, most of whom were homosexual. Following this statement, many more government employees lost their jobs under suspicions over their sexual conduct as this conduct became an issue of major national concern. Central to the ideology of the Lavender Scare was the notion that gays and lesbians could not restrain their sexual urges and that they had other qualities such as mental instability which supposedly made them incapable of being loyal government employees. Among other things, this meant people charged with sexual ‘misconduct’ not only lost their jobs but had their character and quality as persons called into question.

Prior to the Cold War, there had been an era of sexual openness and tolerance in Washington, D.C. Johnson notes that many openly gay men worked in feminized white collar jobs, in civil service and elsewhere, arguing that these men felt more comfortable within the gender norms of these environments than in other workplaces. Local bigots eventually reacted against D.C.’s vibrant gay community. Given D.C.’s status as a national center, and given the post-war context of the Cold War, this local repression quickly became more than a local issue.

Johnson returns to this repression and its growth in his third chapter. This chapter and the next three deal in painstaking detail with government policy and implementation of the Lavender Scare, practices which now look like little more than coordinated harassment and bullying, and popular perceptions of sexual conduct among civil servants.

The book’s final two chapters turn to first-hand accounts of the experience of these purges, and the formation of a collective push-back against institutional homophobia. Johnson focuses mainly on the Mattachine Society of Washington, which used the courts, lobbying, and eventually public pickets on the White House to protest discriminatory policies. Johnson suggests that these formed an important and still overlooked aspect of activism against oppression based on sexuality.

Johnson’s book contains an insight with ramifications beyond the history of sexuality, one which cuts against the impulse of some (myself included) to refer to ‘the state’ as one homogeneous entity, namely the relative autonomy and internal heterogeneity of state. For example, the main agenda of the State Department and the White House was avoiding negative publicity about employees’ sexual ‘misconduct.’ This agenda conflicted with the demands for greater publicity placed by some people involved in Congressional investigations and tribunals. To the degree that the government acts as one body, this is at least in part the product of hegemony and discipline within and across government agencies, produced by processes such as the investigation and screening programs which scrutinized the private behavior and moral character of government employees.


I have one reservation about the book. Throughout the book Johnson uses the term homosexual rather than queer, and writes at least implicitly in favor of his subjects’ goal of inclusion in the form of citizenship and civil rights. From what little I’ve read, these terms and goals are contentious within queer theory and the history of sexuality, I would have liked an appendix or preface dealing with these controversies in relation to his own decisions in the book.

Additional random thoughts:

Johnson treats several things briefly that merit more extensive treatment than they have received in scholarship, as far as I know. For example, Johnson notes that many openly gay men worked in feminized white collar jobs, in civil service and elsewhere, arguing that these men felt more comfortable within the gender norms of these environments than in other workplaces. Perhaps someone has already written it, but the world needs a book on that link between labor processes, gender norms, and sexuality. The world could also use a book that presents more detailed history of the making of gay D.C. than Johnson is able to present – he cites an unpublished 2002 dissertation about D.C., “A Queer Capital” by Brett Beemyn, hopefully that will be published as a book soon.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Celebrating gay pride is celebrating that we have rights

[Gabriella · Rating 2 out of 5]

I learned some things, and the subject matter is certainly on time. It’s wild how everything from anti-intellectualism to 9-to-5-hate to redbaiting can be directly tied to homophobia!!!!! The more things change, the more they stay the same, I fear.

Unfortunately, my bar for historical nonfiction has been set incredibly high this year, and this just didn’t stand out from a narrative aspect. Will plan to update with more takeaways after I return from my trip, but as of now, would not recommend to a wide audience—mostly just researchers focused on this time period.

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally getting around to reading this outstanding 2004 non-fiction book focused on the persecution and witch hunts of gay male and lesbian government workers during the 1950's. Watching Fellow Travelers has made me want to dig deeper into this era. The most shocking take away from the book is that disgusting, hateful behavior by Congress and other government officials is not something new to our era. It has been going on since the Eisenhower era 1953 forward, beginning with the the Ike campaign implying that Stevenson (the Democratic candidate) was gay. The Lavender Scare ruined more lives than its counter Communist scare happening simultaneously. Densely packed with facts, David K. Johnson's book is a must-read as we prepare for the 2024 election next year. And a reminder to all that the only way for history not to repeat itself is if we educate ourselves on the past and find ways to avoid going down the same paths in the future.

[Clayton Brannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent account of the persecutions of homosexuals during the 50s and 60s. This is not some kind of lurid account, it is a scholarly study of the systematic exclusion of an entire group of people from being able to live a normal life and contribute to society. The thousands and thousands who lost their jobs and had their lives destroyed through innuendo and by not so well meaning people who used the system for petty reasons to destroy another persons life.

[Allyson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tldr: acab

I personally enjoyed this book as a return for me to 1950s/60s queer history. Imo it’s such a fascinating time. The 30s and 40s were comparatively open for queer people, a trend that wwii accelerated by bringing people into same sex environments. This increased visibility caused a conservative backlash in the 50s and 60s to homosexuality and gender transgression. Fears about the Cold War intensified the backlash. However, this oppression caused the founding of the first gay and lesbian political organizations and was also a period of flourishing queer subcultures. Due to this coalescing queer community, Stonewall in 1969 was able to spark significant political energy into a sustained movement.

The Lavender Scare was the period when the federal government fired or denied employment to thousands of gay and lesbians, reaching its height in the 1950s when the govt fired about one homosexual a day. Gays and lesbians were often denied employment in the private sector as well, due to govt pressure on businesses. The lavender scare encapsulates the homophobia and resulting resistance of the 1950s.

In the 30s and 40s, DC had a flourishing gay subculture. Conservatives such as McCarthy used gay people to create a panic about national security in the 50s. They allegedly feared that Russia would blackmail gay people into divulging national security. Importantly, at this time people feared that a communist spy might be their neighbor and that communism was destroying the fabric of american society. Thus the middle-class, white, heterosexual nuclear family was seen by many in american society as the first defense against communism. Anyone outside this norm was vilified and often pathologized (immigrants, BIPOC people, queer people, poor people etc.) Medical journals basically claimed that lesbians caused neurosis in men (i wish).

These sustained attacks on gays and lesbians motivated some of those affected to create the first gay political organization in america (the mattachine society. The daughters of bilitis was its lesbian counterpart). Gays and lesbians also resisted these firings in the courts, a slow but ultimately successful strategy.

In light of the recent gutting of the federal workforce, attacks on lgbtq rights, and banning of trans people from the military, this book is unfortunately prescient. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in how a political witch hunt gets started. It’s a solid blueprint for long-term political organizing. Johnson also relies on a truly incredible amount of primary sources and puts the sources together in a very clear and readable way.

That being said, this book is four stars for me rather than five. It is very fixed on white, middle-class history and most of the primary sources are from white men. While the author acknowledges this and explains that the government mostly hired white people due to racism, I think he could have included more info from BIPOC sources. For example, he describes DC queer subcultures extensively and mentions that many gay bars also discriminated against Black clientele despite DC laws banning segregation. Johnson could have also included how queer BIPOC people organized instead. It’s my understanding from previous reading that Black lesbians relied heavily on word-of-mouth private house parties to socialize. I would have enjoyed learning more about this from Johnson. This information feels especially important since Johnson explains that nascent gay political organizations were inspired by and borrowed language from Black civil rights movements.

Also, many workers fired from federal jobs for being gay or lesbian found working-class jobs afterwards. Johnson does not describe how this might have changed their interactions with the queer community, although it is well documented that middle class and working class gay and lesbians had very different subcultures. Middle class queer people focused more on assimilation and a “we’re just like you” approach (ex the mattachine society and the daughters of bilitis), while working class queer people were more visible and assimilated less into middle-class morals (many working class butch women couldnt get jobs bc they refused to look more feminine).

I still recommend the book. Most of it was awesome. Also leisa meyer mentioned LETS GO LESBIANS! If you think this review was long, my thesis on 1950s lesbians was 90 pages so I’m basically yapatron 3000 on the 1950s. I can’t believe students are using ai to write papers while im writing a book review in my notes app that literally NO ONE asked for.

[gab · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I was expecting some more theory and discussion…I felt like this book was just reading a bunch of Wikipedia articles

[Emma Fergus · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I learned nothing else from this book, it’s that present day US History classes do a grave disservice to social justice movements of the 20th and 21st centuries!

Amazing read. Provided great foundation for the direction I want to head in for choosing my dissertation topic!

[clare newt]

idk I felt very smart while reading this

[Paxton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Used it for my History essay, might reread the whole thing if I got the time!

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a leisure read, the text can be a bit dry. As an exploration of how homosexuality was viewed and penalized in the United States during the pre-Stonewall Cold War years, however, it's quite excellent and full of details not present in more general histories of sexuality in this country. It's a great resource to reference in academic and historic write-ups.

[Damon · Rating 5 out of 5]

OK Duckies. So here is my opinion of this book because I actually lived through the horrible period that Johnson writes about. First of all, don't assume that the targeting of LGBT folks started with Donald Trump. This crap has been going on for a very very long time with lives being lost along the way. YES! The fear and intimidation that was imposed upon closeted LGBT people who were "outed" was so great that many committed suicides as there were those who were married with children, or either lost jobs, families, and friends, or were either so ashamed for being Gay because they had unfortunately bought and internalized the homophobia that had been projected upon them. If you want to know about homosexuality during the 1950s and 1960s - pre Stonewall - then you must read this book.

[Phil · Rating 5 out of 5]

makes a compelling case, I think, that we cannot talk about the Red Scare without talking about the federal government's purge of queer people from its payrolls. in terms of sheer numbers, more gay men and lesbians, or people accused of being gay or lesbian, lost their careers to the national security state apparatus than suspected Communists.

[Brad · Rating 3 out of 5]

On July 3, 1975, the U.S. Civil Service Commission issued new regulations to remove "immoral conduct" from its list of disqualifications for federal government employment. After years of activism and, largely, manoeuvres through the federal legal superstructure, this was a watershed moment after which sweeping panoptic power found itself sustainably undermined. The vague, paranoid and power-grabbing pretense of homosexuality as an international "security risk" and of some shadowy, loosely-organized group(s) seeking to use it to undermine the United States had to give way to more clearly defined battles.

With the federal government's legal positions made clear, and the 'gay vulnerability to blackmail' claim undermined by increasing openness among LGBTQ civil servants, state agencies could finally be compelled to back down from their more brazen assault.

In an era known for the phenomenon of ‘naming names,’ the almost total anonymity of the thousands of gay men and lesbians touched by the purges is remarkable. This strategy of deliberate concealment served the purgers well. It allowed a fantastical image of sexual perverts to reign without the countervailing weight of any reference to reality. Gays, even more than Communists, were phantoms, ciphers upon whom could be projected fears about the declining state of America’s moral fiber.

Johnson's detailed history of the lesser-known (or lesser-discussed, at least) shade of McCarthyism is an essential work of American Cold War history. Dealing with the monitoring, firing from civil service and private (particularly 'defense') contractors, and the fomenting of a climate of fear, suspicion, and harassment in the LGBTQ community by federal agencies, this account through the eyes of contemporary persons targeted by the "Lavender Scare" illustrates the extent of moral panic in post-war America's pursuit of self-portrayal through militaristic machismo.

The purges facilitated the formation not of a singular community but several insular ones divided by class interests and the need to protect one’s job. But within such insular groups, the purges created a sense of solidarity, particularly between lesbians and gay men, who came to rely on one another in social settings requiring a display of heterosexuality.

While this illustrates the dialectical process of oppression triggering a response by the oppressed, spontaneity can settle into being co-opted. One revealing episode of a gay rights movement, the "Mattachine Society", sums this up as follows:

[After noting that the CPUSA at the time was less than forward-thinking about LGBTQ+ rights:] Too many of our people are involved in their social oppression, their personal love adventures in an atmosphere of legal persecution, and their day-to-day problems of making a living and paying their bills to have any energy, let alone inclination, to participate in revolutionary movements.

This (and the brevity of reference to class) illustrates how contradictions in the superstructure can end up resolved in what historian John D'Emilio has called "a retreat to respectability" after earlier direct activism---and how the narrow-mindedness of trivializing superstructural struggles actively foments movements' liberal co-optation. If, as shown in Kelly v. United States and Guarro v. United States, a sufficiently high-level judicial body is sympathetic to curbing police-state action, it will absorb much of the pressure. That's not to say it's a wrong avenue for activists to pursue--the lesson here is it can and has had more 'give' than more intransigent structures. But there are consequences when "In both its planning and rhetoric, the MSW sought to place itself squarely within the tradition of lawful American protest."

Where the economy does figure into this narrative, it is to highlight the tactical adoption of a 'libertarian' view of the private life of the citizen as a space separate from relations of production/employment. While this work thoroughly explores the limits of a compulsion to frame LGBT rights as expressing a private life of sexuality cordoned off from federal/private contractor employment, and while Johnson notes the personal financial consequences loss of employment held for activists, the book does not explicitly draw the connection between economic autocracy and cultural scapegoating (Why would *bourgeois interests* put so much emphasis on purging gay men especially from state positions?). Questioning the 'rational connection' between personal life and professional function and reifying such a division of space may be tactically useful, but its manifestations in "Don't ask, don't tell" have shown their limits since. That limit is not just one of a stepping stone on the way to legal equality, as the book legalistically suggests, but an expression of an enduring idea ("Do what you want, just don't flaunt it" is still a common enough cry from reactionaries during Pride). The vague dimensions of public opinion make it something for reactionaries to weaponize, but a reckoning with some concrete form of it is needed in the critique of decades of sustained policies and ideology. This work notes the increasingly flimsy use of public moral outrage as a pretext for suspicion of LGBTQ employees, but sets aside a broader look at why that perspective may have shifted (shifting legal opinion is no mere proxy for shifting public opinion).

In fact, the split between an emphasis on creating space for private life and an emphasis on radical or direct community activism came up concretely in struggle:

Soon a split developed between those who wanted interesting meetings that served the needs of the members and those, like Kameny, who wanted to focus single-mindedly on changing the status of the homosexual in the larger society...While Kameny, the [MSW] president from 1961 to 1964, boasted that the group had been recognized by the local government, other civil liberties groups, and government officials, it had a tenuous relationship to its own gay constituency. The Mattachine Society of Washington may have spoken for the homosexual minority, but it never became a grassroots gay organization. Membership never exceeded one hundred people...and a group of ten to fifteen people formed the core of the organization.

Lessons?

1. A movement that openly challenges a prevailing and weaponized prejudice takes dedicated, militant action, but with enduring results.

2. The militant core is necessary (manifest in Kameny's call to "move from research and education efforts to 'social action.'"), to drive a sustained political direction and adapt in the face of suppression.

3. That said, "Knowing that organizational resources were available to defend them emboldened gay and lesbian civil servants." So a dedicated core gave a sense of empowerment to broader action just by its presence. Employees facing denial of security clearance and/or termination came to actively resist, broadening the movement and forcing negotiations.

4. Moving the needle of the legal superstructure is a channel for activism with historically tangible results, but resisting the pushback takes long-term grassroots organizing even to keep the legal position from retrogressing.

===
There's more to explore here. Specifically:

1. The contentious relationship between erstwhile medical experts & upstart demagogues even in the 1950s re: Homosexuality as medical vs. Homosexuality as moral. ("physicians complicated the committee’s task by suggesting that gender and sexuality were fluid.")

2. The stark and complete absence of any mention of pinkwashing of imperialism.

I may elaborate soon in a comment below.

[William Dameron · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a fascinating read about a little reported era. While I was familiar with the cold war and McCarthy's witch hunt for communists in the federal government and how I thought gays were tangentially involved, I was not aware that it was primarily LGBT individuals who were targeted. It is in incredibly important read in order to understand how this fear and shame has been handed down to future generations and affected the generations who came after those targeted. The Mattachine Society, Kameny, and others have often been overlooked. This book gives credit to those early pre-stonewall heroes.

[Sofia Lemay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay so to be fair I didn't read all the chapters of this book, only the ones that were relevant to my research and then some, so a little over half the book.

Still, I think it was well-written... I don't really know how to review a non-fiction book. Should I talk about the plot? The characters? They're literally dictated by history.

However, I thought that the writing was really effective (getting to the point quickly) and that the information was well-presented in a way that made it almost enjoyable to read. It dragged in parts (especially when it got into American politics, I was a little lost), but overall it was pretty good.

This may have nothing to do with the author, but it's still a very heartbreaking story, but one that's necessary to read about. I learnt a lot.

[Jackie · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's shocking that this era existed that that neither I nor anyone else I've talked to has heard about it. David Johnson brought to light an enormous, decades-long crusade against gay Americans, concurrent but even more damaging than the Red Scare of the 1950s. The Lavender Scare deserves a place in American history books alongside other events of the early Cold War.

[Talia Scibetta · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The history of LGBT rights in the United States is one of advances followed by backlash. Conservative enemies will come up with new rhetoric and tactics, and the courts sometimes change their opinions. Nevertheless, the formidable legacy of Kameny and his allies suggests that moral panics can be defeated and that reason and justice do sometimes prevail.”

[Phia Prichard · Rating 3 out of 5]

not nearly as fun to read as my other books for this class if i’m being fr

[Bec · Rating 4 out of 5]

While dense, this is a book we need to talk about more. Every single person should learn about the lavender scare and the way the US government targeted queer men and women. Very informative.

[mack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fundamental queer history

[Laina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinating and enraging. You can see the pathways from this to where we are now, and it was pretty shocking to see the same rhetoric and word choices being made.