The Lavender Scare and the History of LGBTQ Exclusion
This month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the Navy would rename the USNS Harvey Milk, named after the assassinated gay-rights icon, Navy Veteran, and San Francisco politician. The decision is the latest in a series of actions by the Trump Administration during its second term that reflect a broader rollback of LGBTQ rights. Since January, the administration has reinstated a ban on transgender military service members, which the Supreme Court has allowed the administration to implement while legal challenges wind through the court system; has ordered the federal government only to recognize two sexes; and has sought to bar transgender athletes from participating in women's sports. According to Gallup, since 2022, Republican support for same-sex marriage has dropped from 55% to 41%.
The rollback of LGBTQ rights and inclusion echoes an often overlooked, but deeply consequential, chapter of American history: the Lavender Scare. During the Cold War, U.S. officials branded gay and lesbian Americans as national security threats, fueling a moral panic that reshaped American society and stigmatized countless individuals. The legacy of the Lavender Scare era continues to influence America's culture and political landscape.
The Lavender Scare emerged in the early 1950s alongside the Red Scare. But while Red Scare proponents like Senator Joseph McCarthy and others linked homosexuality to communism, the campaign against LGBTQ Americans operated on distinct ideological grounds. A 1950 State Department memo, titled 'Problem of Homosexuals and Sex Perverts in the Department of State,' linked tolerance of 'homosexuality with the accompanying decline of the Egyptian, Greek and Roman Empires' and argued that the United States, as the modern global power, had to purge gay and lesbian individuals to survive the Cold War. The State Department took heed of such harmful, and ahistorical, rhetoric.
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That same year, Deputy Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy testified before a Senate subcommittee that while no communists were employed at the State Department, the department had ousted various individuals considered security risks, including 91 people the department deemed homosexuals. Rather than calming fears, Peurifoy's testimony intensified public anxiety.
White House Cabinet meetings followed up on the supposed security threats of homosexuality. Newspapers ran stories highlighting the imagined security risks posed by gay and lesbian government workers. Politicians brought the issue to House and Senate floors and committees. On the House floor, Rep. Arthur L. Miller, a Republican from Nebraska warned that while there were 91 of them dismissed in the State Department, there were 'several thousand" more LGBTQ workers employed by the Federal Government. 'I sometimes wonder how many of these homosexuals have….been in sensitive positions and subject to blackmail,' he asked, asserting that "the Russians are strong believers in homosexuality, and that those same people are able to get into the State Department and get somebody in their embrace.' Miller argued that Russian agents could seduce gay and lesbian federal workers in order to blackmail them, exploiting their fear of being outed to force them to betray the United States. 'These people are dangerous. They will go to any limit," summarized Miller. "They are not to be trusted and when blackmail threatens they are a dangerous group.'
Officials across the government and journalists repeated the suggestion that Soviet agents could threaten to out, or blackmail, gay and lesbian government workers if they refused to collaborate. Yet, no evidence ever surfaced that any gay or lesbian government worker had betrayed the U.S. under duress.
Nonetheless, in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, declaring 'sexual perversion,' a euphemism for homosexuality, a national security risk. The order authorized invasive investigations, surveillance, and dismissals across federal agencies and the military. By the end of the decade, an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 individuals accused of being homosexual had been fired or forced to resign, often ruining the lives of dedicated civil servants.
But the Lavender Scare spread far beyond the federal government. With discrimination being not only encouraged but legal, businesses increasingly refused to hire queer people, stripping them of dignity and opportunity without any legal recourse. Municipal governments and postal authorities cracked down on queer literature. Newspapers, magazines, and tabloids often tied homosexuality to criminality and even equated queer people to pedophiles and murderers. Some newspapers even published the names and addresses of those arrested for consensual same-sex acts, leading to job loss, public shaming, and, in some tragic cases, suicide.
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The anti-LGBTQ campaign also reshaped the cultural norms of minority communities. Many working-class Black neighborhoods before the 1950s had a culture of queer acceptance. Harlem's drag ball culture, for example, thrived from the 1920s through the early 1950s. Transgender people, drag queens, and drag kings participated openly in public life. Black newspapers and magazines promoted drag balls as community events in Harlem and other places such as Chicago, Washington D.C., and Baltimore.
As the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, however, many Black leaders embraced white, middle-class norms—including heteronormativity—as a strategy for advancing desegregation and civil rights for the larger Black community.
Bayard Rustin, an openly gay Civil Rights leader and the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, was often sidelined from playing a more prominent role in the Civil Rights Movement because of his sexuality, despite his political talents. Even Martin Luther King, Jr., while hiring Rustin as a close advisor and collaborator, began to publicly distance himself from queer people because, as Rustin observed, it became 'a problem for the movement.' Rustin noted King's other advisors 'felt I was a burden.' To insulate King from critique, Rustin chose to resign from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference although he remained a close collaborator of MLK.
The influence of the Lavender Scare on Black leaders' public perception of queer people is evident in an advice column King wrote for Ebony. In 1958, an advice seeker reached out the magazine, writing: 'I am a boy, but I feel about boys the way I ought to feel about girls….Is there any place where I can go for help?' With generally sympathetic words, at least for a national leader during the Lavender Scare era, King responded, 'Your problem is not at all an uncommon one….The type of feeling that you have toward boys is probably not an innate tendency, but something that has been culturally acquired.' King went on, 'I would suggest that you see a good psychiatrist who can assist you.' He assured the writer, 'You are already on the right road toward a solution, since you honestly recognize the problem and have a desire to solve it.' By the mid-1950s, publications like Ebony, as evident with King's advice column, shifted from covering and celebrating Black queer culture to emphasizing Black nuclear families, military service, and economic mobility.
During the late 1960s the narratives surrounding the Lavender Scare began to unravel under queer liberation movements. Black and Latino activists played a central role in increasing the visibility of LGBTQ communities, bolstered by advocacy from organizations like the Civil Liberties Union.
In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that homosexuality could not justify terminating federal employment. Two years later, in 1975, the Senate disbanded its investigative committee targeting LGBTQ federal workers. While LGBTQ rights saw little advancement during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, this changed in 1994 when President Bill Clinton Administration's 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy ended the outright ban on LGBTQ military service, even if enforcing silence. The next year, Clinton issued an executive order ending the Lavender Scare-era practice of denying security clearances based on sexual orientation. By 2011, queer people were allowed to openly serve in the military. Finally, in 2017, President Barack Obama entirely nullified Eisenhower's 1953 Executive Order 10450 with his own executive order during his last days in office.
The Lavender Scare devastated the lives of queer people and for decades redefined American ideas of citizenship and belonging along narrower parameters. Today's political efforts to purge queer people and curtail their rights are not new—they are part of a longer history of exclusion and marginalization. Understanding that history is essential to confronting the present.
Joel Zapata is an Assistant Professor of History and Cairns K. Smith Faculty Scholar at Oregon State University.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
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