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The Lavender Scare was a moral panic about homosexual people in the United States government which led to their mass dismissal from government service during the mid-20th century.
The Lavender Scare is the first documentary film to tell the little-known story of an unrelenting campaign by the federal government to identify and fire all employees suspected of being homosexual. In 1953, President Eisenhower declared gay men and lesbians to be a threat to the security of the country and therefore unfit for government service.
Jun 2, 2023 · Beginning in the late 1940s and continuing through the 1960s, thousands of gay employees were fired or forced to resign from the federal workforce because of their sexuality. Dubbed the Lavender Scare, this wave of repression was also bound up with anti-Communism and fueled by the power of congressional investigation.
Jun 5, 2018 · Historian David K. Johnson gave the period a name in his book, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. Johnson documents the use of the...
Dec 22, 2020 · Known as the “Lavender Scare,” the policy was based on the unfounded fear that gay men and lesbians “posed a threat to national security because they were vulnerable to blackmail and were ...
Nov 27, 2019 · The “Lavender Scare” refers to the identification and mass firings of thousands of homosexual people from the U.S. federal government during the 1950s. This gay witch hunt grew out of the post-World War II Red Scare and its subsequent McCarthyism era campaign to purge communists from the government.
Aug 10, 2023 · In a moment when LGBTQ+ rights are again in the public crosshairs, we tell the story of the Lavender Scare: its victims, its proponents, and a man who fought for decades to end it.
