The Lavender Scare

This 1961 article describes the defection to the USSR of two NSA analysts. Though their defection was politically motivated, news accounts focused on their sexuality and suggested that communists would blackmail government employees by instigating or uncovering homosexual encounters.

Gay Treason imagines a gay man giving U.S. secrets to the Nazis durint WWII. Like Go Down, Aaron, this novel-cover links sexual and political "perversions."

Weekend Homo warns of the dangers of even a single homosexual encounter- "Chad was a happily married man until that day when he wandered into a gay bar by mistake."

The lesbian potential for criminal insanity teases readers of Lesbian Web of Evil.

Senator Swish revels in the image of a political playboy- a man with heterosexual appeal and a "twilight" homosexual life.

I, Homosexual is a pulp novel with academic pretensions, offering "personal case studies" that would reveal the truth about homosexuality.

Another faux-journalistic book, The Other Men is "the hard-hitting report that pulls no punches about the current homosexual invasion!"

A celebrated author of gay lives, the cover of Fritz Peters' work nonetheless purports to reveal the "tragic consequences" of homosexuality.  A dissaproving tone on the cover allowed for gay and lesbian stories to avoid obscenity laws in the 1950s and early '60s.

In 1950, amidst cold war paranoia and homophobia, nearly six hundred federal civil servants who were presumed to be homosexual were fired. David K. Johnson’s, The Lavender Scare: the Cold War Prosecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (2004) refutes the notion of an “invisibility” homosexuality in the 1950s and '60s. Johnson argues that homosexuals were not “invisible” but that the public discourse was shrouded in euphemistic language, such as referring to a homosexual as simply a “security risk.”

The fear and paranoia of anti-communism, as well as a shifting understanding of homosexuality on the part of the military, led to a new definition of a homosexual as a person who has had even a single homosexual encounter in his or her life- and that encounter could lead straight to blackmail.  Linking homosexuality to Communism, and labeling both a psychological maladjustment forced gays and lesbians to unite as a group in order to confront the medical and psychiatric institution two decades before the Stonewall Revolt.

These pulp-novel covers reflect themes of dangerous double lives, secretly queer politicians, and the criminal and psychological dangers of homosexuality that linked them rhetorically to communism. The fact that not a single occasion of blackmail against a homosexual federal employee led to an actual security risk became an unimportant quibble in the face of cold-war rhetoric that insisted the very nature of gender, and therefore, democracy, was at stake.

To learn more about the "lavender scare," check out David K. Johnson's book, this excellent website, or a new documentary.