The film Spartacus (1960) was written by Dalton Trumbo while he was blacklisted and used classical history to make allusions to HUAC. But it also had a lot of gay subtext. Did blacklisted authors feel a kinship to homosexual oppression? Was there a ‘pink scare’? Was homosexuality linked to communism in public discourses?
The 'Lavender Scare' was going on during the second Red Scare (the era of McCarthyism), and refers to the massive blacklisting of homosexuals from working in the government.
The beginning of the Lavender Scare goes back to 1950, right when the era of McCarthyism was beginning. When McCarthy claimed there were 205 secret communists working in the State Department, the State Department forced 91 gay employees to resign. The Republican National Committee chairman at the time - Guy George Gabrielson - warned that "sexual perverts" as he called them were as big if not a bigger threat than communists.
Around this time, McCarthy hired Roy Cohn (yes THAT Roy Cohn), to join his witch hunt. Cohn and McCarthy worked with the government to spread the notion that homosexuals were more likely to be blackmailed into serving communist agendas. The two spent a very long time conflating homosexuality with communism. McCarthy is famously quoted as saying, "If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you've got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker."
By the end of the Truman era, McCarthy and Cohn had ousted 425 alleged homosexuals from the State Department. When Eisenhower got to the White House, the Lavender Scare reached the pinnacle with Executive Order 10450 barring any homosexuals from working for the federal government. An order that was not rescinded until 1973 when a federal judge overruled it. EO 10450 led to the firing of approximately 5000 gay federal employees.
The era surrounding the Lavender Scare is credited heavily with promoting the exclusion of homosexuals from mainstream American society, and ultimately led to the creation of much of what we now consider to be gay culture. LGBT historian Lillian Faderman credits this era as the separation of the LGBT community from simply being a sexual orientation into now also being a social orientation.
You will find odd words in the vocabulary of the homosexual. There are many types such as the necrophalia, fettichism, pygmalionism, fellatios, cunnilinguist, sodomatic, pederasty, saphism, sadism, and masochist. Indeed, there are many methods of practices among the homosexuals. You will find those people using the words as, "He is a fish. He is a bull-dicker. He is mamma and he is papa, and punk, and pimp." Yes; in one of our prominent restaurants rug parties and sex orgies go on. Some of those people have been in the State Department, and I understand some of them are now in the other departments. The 91 who were permitted to resign have gone some place, and, like birds of a feather, they flock together. Those people like to be known to each other. They have signs used on streetcars and in public places to call attention to others of like mind.
During the McCarthy era, homosexuality was viewed as linked to the Communist threat in multiple ways -- both directly, as a phenomenon with ideological ties to Communism, and indirectly, as a potential vulnerability point for Communist blackmail. Joseph McCarthy's statements concerning the State Department's two hundred and fifty "card-carrying communists" came in February 1950, and soon after McCarthy produced an impressive number of supposed case studies of State Department individuals charged as "loyalty risks" -- the overwhelming majority for reasons of political affiliation, and two instances singled out not only of political deviance but sexual deviance. These two cases were in the minority, but they seemed to illustrate a desirable concept for McCarthy and those who emulated him -- association with homosexuality reflected some grand inner truth about the perversity of communism, and association with communism served to further stigmatize homosexuality. Further revelations regarding the ousting of ninety-one known or suspected homosexuals enforced the public impression that the State Department had a lavender problem -- an infestation of subhuman creatures who had been permitted to infiltrate the United States government under Democratic administrations.
The framework for the systematic identification and persecution of homosexuals had been laid by efforts to root out LGBT service members during the Second World War. The discharge of homosexuals from military service set a precedent for the dismissal of homosexuals from government employ, but it also set a precedent for the methods used to identify homosexuals for the purposes of a community-wide purge. Gay gathering places were identified and surveilled; potential homosexuals might be assessed for their conformity to perceived homosexual traits. Once identified and confronted, an individual accused of homosexual acts might be pressed to disclose the names of others she knew to be homosexuals, including partners and friends. It seems unlikely that any regime or program had a monopoly on forcing individuals to name names during this era, but the tactics of the later postwar era were already taking shape.
Truman's 1948 Executive Order 9835 established further basis for the policing of State employees on the basis of their loyalty or disloyalty to the United States -- this included any "sympathetic association" with any communist or subversive organization, any actions undertaken in service of another country's interests over those of the United States, and any intentional unauthorized disclosure of confidential information. This order didn't single out homosexuality or morals-related offenses for federal screening, but it did reinforce the State Department's preexisting guidelines regarding the appointing of individuals of known immoral conduct, and it increased pressures to screen for markers of immoral conduct that might be more concrete and more easily identified. Eisenhower's Executive Order 10450, executed in 1953, explicitly singled out "sexual perversion" among those traits that would bar any applicant from attaining a position in a federal office. What had happened in the intervening years? Why make this undesired moral quality particularly explicit? How did homosexuality prime a person to commit treason against their country?
After World War Two, the attention paid to sex crime increased markedly in American news media, spurred on by FBI campaigns that grouped together homosexuals and rapists under the same generic category, as degenerate perverts. In this new rhetoric of sexual perversion, even types of sexual offender traditionally understood as non-violent misdemeanors -- pornographers, exhibitionists, participants in consensual sodomy -- were on the path of escalation into violent sex crimes against children and eventual murder. "Homosexual marauding" was classified alongside gang rape and child abuse as a new and fearful hazard of urban life. Popular writing and the opinion of respected figures in medicine and law enforcement contributed to the idea that homosexuals were psychologically disturbed and emotionally immature -- they existed in opposition to the social order and were incapable of functioning within it. The kindest thing that could be said of a homosexual person under this prevailing psychiatric and legal dialogue would be that they were sick and urgently required a cure. This stigma against homosexuality increased the bonds of affinity between those who knew one another to be homosexuals and fostered a climate of secrecy, while beyond the homosexual community it shored up the impression of homosexuality as a gateway to an impulsive and disordered life of crime.
In popular perception in postwar America, homosexuality and Communism were constructed as broadly similar phenomena. They both existed as shadowy underworlds within otherwise normal communities, they both employed secretive rendezvous places and their own jargon and coded language, they both operated along lines of association and affinity where a communist was likely to know and associate with other communists and a homosexual was likely to know and associate with other homosexuals. Either might have good reason to speak of an individual as "one of us", a fellow-traveler or a fine sister. Homosexuals and communists both flouted the law and the conventions of the traditional family. Most ominously, they both recruited. This perception of homosexuality as an underground web of illicit association was shaped by the necessities of gay life before broad public acceptance, rather than some inherent trait in the natures of men who love men and women who love women, but the association between homosexuality and underworld criminality remained largely unquestioned. The groundwork was laid for the popular idea that homosexuals, like communists, might dwell among ordinary citizens and pose a buried threat to their communities. In its most developed form, this rhetoric posited the existence of an organized homosexual cabal transcending all borders with aims of destroying society, a gay "Homintern" to parallel the Soviet Comintern:
Welded together by the identity of their forbidden desires, of their strange, sad needs, habits, danger, not to mention their outrageously fatuous vocabulary, members of this International constitute a world-wide conspiracy against society. This conspiracy has spread all over the globe; has penetrated all classes; operates in armies and in prisons; has infiltrated the press, the movies, and the cabinets; and it all but dominates the arts, literature, theater, music, and TV.
- R. G. Waldeck, “Homosexual International,” Human Events 9, no.16, April 16, 1952
Republicans like Miller contemporary Kenneth Wherry alleged a collaborative effort between homosexuals and Soviet agents that could lead to widespread sabotage. Even in the absence of an organized collaborative effort to undermine the West, the aforementioned stigma of violence and sickness made homosexuality such self-evident grounds for blackmail that even those who detested homosexuality in the most vehement terms recognized that its broad social unacceptability made its practitioners susceptible to blackmail by external forces. If State Department employees were admitted without any sort of prior vetting for homosexual tendencies or homosexual case-history, then an unknown number of homosexuals (capable of appearing normal, perhaps) might be positioned in roles that permitted them to influence government decisionmaking, and an unknown number of communist blackmailers might be exerting subtle pressure on those homosexuals in order to illicitly manipulate foreign and domestic policy. A full investigation under the Hoey Committee ultimately confirmed that this vulnerability existed only in potential, with no conclusive proof that such an instance of blackmail had ever taken place to date involving Communist agents or any other national enemy, but nevertheless affirmed the prevailing attitude that homosexuals were security risks. The notion was too convenient to be crushed; it seemed to fit too neatly with the popular perception of homosexuality and communism as parallel phenomena, and the even earlier perception of homosexuals as unmanly and unwomanly specimens likely to buckle under pressure. The proposed solution was not to diminish the stigma that would enable such blackmail but to expel even suspected homosexuals from their positions of influence (however slight) as a precautionary measure. This led the State Department into a policy eliminating known and suspected homosexuals from employment -- one that crystallized in the very early 1950s but lasted for decades beyond.
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