Last night, as
part of their celebration of Queer Pride, PBS showed a fascinating documentary
called The Lavender Scare, produced and
directed by Josh Howard and with some familiar names to me (including former Zenger’s cover boy Kevin Jennings of GLAAD and Andrew Tobias,
multi-millionaire financier and author of The Best Little Boy in the
World, a memoir of growing up Gay which he
signed with the name “John Reid”) on his production staff, based on a book of
the same title by David Johnson which would be worth reading. The film
apparently premiered in a theatre in New York’s Greenwich Village on June 7,
2019 (in a 77-minute version, longer than the one we got on TV), but according
to imdb.com was actually made two years earlier.
The story really
begins in the 1930’s, when under the Franklin Roosevelt administration and its
New Deal response to the 1929 Depression, the size of the federal government
zoomed upward and Washington, D.C. attracted a lot of America’s best and
brightest with the promise of making good livings and serving the public good. A lot of those people were
Gay, Lesbian or whatever in the ridiculous alphabet-soup identifier our
community now goes by (I’ve seen “LGBT,” “LGBTQ,” “LGBTQ+” and even “LGBTQQIAA”
— the last came from the Queer student group at UCSD and means “Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual and Allies” — the
last being the current term of art for straight people who support Queer
rights), and freed from the social and sexual constraints of their small towns
and adrift in the big city, they found out that there were others like them,
met, hooked up, formed relationships and did the other things adult humans do
together regardless of their sexuality.
Then in 1941 the
U.S. got involved in World War II and a lot of people who hadn’t necessarily
known they were Queer before ended up in military service, rigidly segregated
by sex, and being in single-sex environments brought out their natural
inclinations and they started to act on them. (As late as the 1980’s and 1990’s
Queers in the U.S. military were telling me when I interviewed them that they
hadn’t realized they were Queer until
they were in the single-sex environment of the military — the obvious comeback
to the homophobes who asked people in the days of the military ban and the
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy which followed, “Why did you join the military when you knew we wouldn’t accept you?”)
But these
advances were threatened and ultimately stopped by the highly repressive
political, social and sexual climate of the Cold War and the so-called McCarthy
era, which began an era of witchhunts not only against actual or suspected
Communists (or liberals who could be framed as Communists, since part of the
Right’s objective in the McCarthy era, as now, was to ensure themselves
permanent dominance of American politics by demonizing their opponents and
putting them “beyond the pale” of acceptable political discourse) but against
Queers as well. In 1953 newly elected Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower
issued an executive order banning all “homosexuals” from federal employment —
no exceptions, no ifs, ands or buts.
Josh Howard’s
narration, delivered by actress Glenn Close, is undecided as to whether
President Eisenhower issued this order out of genuine conviction that Queer
people constituted a security risk or to provide political cover to the Right
of his party. But an earlier PBS documentary mentioned that when Eisenhower was
supreme Allied military commander during World War II he had tried to issue a
similar order to fire all Gay and Lesbian members of his immediate staff — and,
in a rare display of courage, the woman he told to compile the list of Queers
on his staff for him to fire said to him, “If you order me to make that list,
my name will be the first on it.”
The Cultural Context
In 1953, sex
between two partners of the same gender was illegal in every U.S. state.
Homosexuality was defined as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual (DSM), the official
guide of the psychiatric profession as to what constituted diseases of the
mind. The very term “homosexual” had been coined by a Hungarian researcher in
1865 as a definition of a mental illness, and that had been considered a step
forward since previously homosexuality had been defined as a sin against God
that deserved the death penalty. Anyone caught having Gay sex or declaring him-
or herself Gay risked not only imprisonment but social disgrace and
unemployability. Anyone growing up and realizing their sexual attractions ran
towards people of their own sex would hear nothing but a chorus of
condemnation; the church would say they were immoral, science would say they
were “sick,” the economy would say they shouldn’t be allowed to work and the
law would say they were criminals.
And yet Queer
people and their straight allies actually stuck their toes into the pool of
activism in ways sometimes subtle and sometimes surprisingly bold. At the end
of the 19th century German physician and sex researcher Magnus
Hirschfeld organized a group called the Scientific Humanitarian Committee and
started a petition calling on the German government to repeal its laws against
Gay sex. The first Queer rights group in the U.S., the Society for Human
Rights, was founded in Chicago in 1924 by Henry Gerber, a German immigrant
inspired by Hirschfeld’s example. “I had always bitterly felt the injustice
with which my own American society accused the homosexual of ‘immoral acts,’”
Gerber wrote. His organization lasted less than two years.
The continuous history of Queer rights activism in the U.S. began
in 1950, when Harry Hay — who, more than any other single person, deserves the
title of founder of the movement — and four of his friends held a private
meeting in Los Angeles. The group they founded was called the Mattachine
Society, after a tribe of traveling jesters in medieval Italy whom Hay had
discovered in his researches and believed had been Gay. Hay and some of the
other Mattachine founders had been members of the Communist Party and the
Progressive Party, which ran former vice-president Henry A. Wallace for
president in 1948 under a platform of reconciliation with the Soviet Union and
an end to the Cold War. Hay adopted a secretive cell-like structure for
Mattachine and scored an early victory when one of its founders, Dale Jennings,
was arrested for crusing an undercover police officer in a restroom. Jennings
challenged the charges in court and was acquitted.
Like much of the
“official” history of America’s Queer rights movement, The Lavender Scare gives short shrift to Mattachine and denounces it as
accommodationist and not radical enough. Part of that reputation was earned; in
1953, Hay and the founders were purged in a sort of internalized version of the
Cold War, and the people who took over at the time largely adopted the
mainstream psychiatric view that homosexuality was a mental illness. They
pleaded for legalization and equal rights on the ground that Queer people, like
people with physical disabilities, shouldn’t be discriminated against because
they were sick. But, as John D’Emilio (who’s briefly interviewed in The
Lavender Scare) pointed out in his book Sexual
Politics, Sexual Communities, his 1983
history of the pre-Stonewall Queer rights movement, visibility was a two-edged
sword for the early Queer movement. Queer activists in the 1950’s realized they
needed to be visible to overcome the prejudice against them — but that very
visibility meant they risked being targeted for being arrested, fired and
disgraced.
Kangaroo Courts and Gay
Inquisitors
So when
Eisenhower declared his intention to fire every last homosexual from the
federal government, there was virtually no public opposition. The witch-hunting
Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) is shown here in film clips joining the
public denunciation of “perverts” and calling for their total elimination for
federal employment. Eisenhower gave the task of ferreting them out to the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and people interviewed in The
Lavender Scare recalled the kangaroo-court
nature of these “investigations.”
Pairs of FBI
agents just showed up at their offices and called them in for interrogation on
the spot. They were not allowed legal counsel or any sort of due process. They
weren’t allowed even to know what information was being used as the basis of
firing them, much less the chance to confront their accusers. Also, like
witch-hunters everywhere, they hounded the people they targeted to give them
more names and keep the witch-hunt going. Navy Captain Joan Cassidy recalled,
“They said, ‘We have your friend in the next room, she’s already told us you
are Gay. You give us the names of others and we’ll go easier on you.’”
Ironically —
and, oddly, unmentioned in The Lavender Scare — some of the officials carrying out the anti-Gay witchhunt in the
federal government were Gay themselves. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and his
assistant, Clyde Tolson, were a deeply closeted Gay couple who lived together.
Joe McCarthy’s chief of staff, Roy Cohn, was also a closeted Gay man who, after
McCarthy was censured by the U.S. Senate in 1954 and died in 1957, became a
legendary attorney in private practice in New York City. One of Cohn’s clients
was a young real-estate developer named Donald Trump who had inherited a
business building and renting properties in the outer boroughs of New York.
Cohn
masterminded Trump’s ascension to Manhattan and became so important, powerful
and influential that after his death from AIDS complications in 1987 — just
months after the New York State Bar had disbarred him for ethics violations —
that ever since Trump, frustrated when his later attorneys were either too
incompetent or too ethical, has often asked rhetorically, “Where’s my Roy
Cohn?” So when Trump accuses Robert Mueller, his investigators and the
Democrats on the House Judiciary, Intelligence and Oversight Committee of using
“McCarthyite tactics” against him, bear in mind that it’s Trump who has the
direct one-degree-of-separation connection to McCarthy himself.
Dr. Kameny Fights Back
Most of the
government workers who were targeted by the Lavender Scare left government
service in shame and tried as best they could to rebuild their lives. Some,
including one diplomat profiled in The Lavender Scare, committed suicide. A few managed to keep their jobs.
San Francisco postal worker Carl Rizzi, who performed part-time as a drag
entertainer in a Gay bar, wasn’t fired because his supervisor stuck his own
neck out and told the inquisitors that he knew Rizzi was Gay, but he was doing
his job properly, so what was the problem? Captain Cassidy was able to stay in
the service but decided to maintain a low profile and not apply for the
promotions she probably deserved.
The man who
stood out and not only organized a resistance to his own firing but began a
movement against the policy was Dr. Franklin Kameny. Born in New York City, the
son of Jewish immigrants, he decided at an early age to make astronomy his
life’s work. After the war, he studied at Harvard University, where he earned a
Master’s degree in 1949 and a Ph.D. in 1956. He got a teaching job at
Georgetown University for a year and was then hired by the U.S. government. But
Kameny’s government job lasted only a few months before he fell victim to the
anti-Gay witchhunt; investigators dredged up an old case in San Francisco and
used it as the pretext to fire him.
Rather than go
gently into the not-good night of depression and disgrace, Kameny fought back.
First he sued the government and lost when, after a three-year legal battle,
the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his case. Then he started a Mattachine
Society chapter in Washington, D.C. and made the group’s top priority to support
other victims of the federal government’s anti-Queer policy. Along with his
colleague Jack Nichols, Lesbian activist Barbara Gittings, and a few others,
Kameny tried to move Mattachine back to a more confrontational stand. In 1963
the group began a drive to repeal Washington, D.C.’s anti-sodomy law — which
finally passed in 1993, 30 years later.
In 1965 Kameny
did something even more radical. He decided to mount public protests against
the anti-Gay policy, picketing the White House on April 17, 1965. At first he
was only able to recruit 12 people for his pickets, but the demonstrations
eventually grew to about 100 — remember, at a time when being Gay or Lesbian
was itself illegal. Kameny imposed a strict dress code on the protesters; the
men on his picket line had to wear suits and ties, and the women had to wear
dresses, pump shoes and makeup. Kameny’s logic was that to demand the right to
work for the federal government, his activists had to look employable. One Lesbian who marched with him
recalled on The Lavender Scare
that she’d never before worn pumps in her life.
Kameny’s
powerful story was told in The Lavender Scare mostly in his own words. He was extensively interviewed for various
documentaries on the Queer rights movement and was ultimately invited to the
White House by President Barack Obama. In 2010, a year before Kameny’s death, a
short stretch of street in Washington, D.C. was named for him; The
Lavender Scare contains footage of the
renaming ceremony.
Josh Howard’s
script for The Lavender Scare dates the
end of the federal government’s anti-Queer witchhunt as 1995. Though president
Jimmy Carter had issued an executive order as early as 1977 ending
discrimination in federal hiring on the basis of sexual orientation, there was
an important loophole in it. It did not end discrimination in the granting of security clearances.
Part of the
justification for Eisenhower’s original order had been the possibility that
Queer people in the government would be subject to blackmail by hostile foreign
powers if their sexual orientation was revealed. No one in the social climate
of 1953 was about to make the obvious (to us today) counter-argument that if
you eliminated the legal penalties and social opprobrium attached to being Gay
or Lesbian, that would also eliminate the potential for blackmail.
So, though after
1977 Queer people could still work in branches of the federal government that
didn’t require clearance, it was not until 1995 that President Bill Clinton
signed an executive order banning discrimination against Queer people in
granting or maintaining security clearances. And, of course, the ban on Queer
people serving in the U.S. military was not finally lifted until 2010, when a
Democratic Congress passed, and Democratic President Barack Obama signed, the
law repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy Clinton had been forced to
settle on in 1993 when he tried to end anti-Queer discrimination in the U.S.
military by executive order.
Vote for Democrats!
One important
object lesson of The Lavender Scare is
that, contrary to the ridiculous and factually unsustainable position of people
in what I call the “alt-Left” — the ones who proclaim that “there’s no
difference between the Republican and Democratic parties” — there are deep
and profound differences between them,
especially on Queer rights. It was a Republican President, Eisenhower, who
imposed the ban on Queer people in the federal government in the first place,
while Democratic Presidents Carter, Clinton and Obama took it down step by
step.
When the final
credits of The Lavender Scare flashed
that Dr. Frank Kameny had died on October 11, 2011, my immediate thought was,
“At least he has been spared President Trump.” Under Trump and the Republicans
in his administration, particularly his evangelical Christian vice-president
Mike Pence, Obama’s executive orders protecting the rights of Transgender
people have been reversed, as have been Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD) regulations banning anti-Queer discrimination in federal housing
projects. Trump has also banned Transgender servicemembers from the U.S.
military. One New Yorker report
on the Presidential transition said that Mike Pence actually lobbied Trump to
repeal the executive orders Carter and Clinton had issued ending discrimination
against Queer people in federal employment, though thank goodness for small
mercies that Trump hasn’t — not yet, anyway — gone that far.
So one lesson from The Lavender Scare is that it’s crucial that Queer people and their
straight allies in the U.S. need to vote for Democrats and not waste their
votes on at best powerless and at worst counterproductive alternative parties.
The Democrats haven’t always been our friends, but the Republicans — especially
today, with their heavy reliance on the votes of Right-wing evangelical
Christians and moral reactionaries in general — are our relentless and
implacable enemies.
