Throughline - The Lavender Scare

Episode Date: August 10, 2023

One day in late April 1958, a young economist named Madeleine Tress was approached by two men in suits at her office at the U.S. Department of Commerce. They took her to a private room, turned on a tape recorder, and demanded she respond to allegations that she was an "admitted homosexual." Two weeks later, she resigned. Madeleine was one of thousands of victims of a purge of gay and lesbian people ordered at the highest levels of the U.S. government: a program spurred by a panic that destroyed careers and lives and lasted more than forty years. Today, it's known as the "Lavender Scare." 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.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. A warning before we get started. This episode contains homophobic language and a description of suicide. On a hot day in April 1958, a young economist working at the Department of Commerce named Madeline Tress was brought into a room with no air conditioning for an interview. It wasn't done by Department of Commerce people. It wasn't done by Department of Commerce people. That's Madeline Tress's voice in an oral history interview made decades after the incident. She had incredible credentials. She went to NYU. She'd spent some time at the London School of Economics. She'd worked really hard to get this job as an economist.

You know, so she's beginning this career in government service. Madeline was wearing a pale blue suit and high heels the day of the interview. The two investigators who called her in worked for the U.S. Civil Service Commission. They turned on a tape recorder. They began by saying, Mistress, your voluntary appearance here today has been requested in order to afford you an opportunity to answer questions concerning information which has been received by the U.S. Civil Service Commission. She's asked to swear an oath.

And she realizes this is much more serious than she anticipated. She asks if she can have an attorney, and I say no she can't. It's a very scary experience. Is it what? The interview? The interview. The first questions were basic. Name, address, date of birth. And then out of nowhere, one investigator asked, Ms. Trez, the commission has information that you weren't admitted homosexual. What comment do you wish to make regarding this matter? Madeline Tress froze. She knew that if she was honest and said that she was a lesbian, that she would lose her job.

She also knew that if she lied about it, she could lose her job for that. So she said she wasn't going to answer any questions. But the agents went on asking more questions, intimate questions. Like sort of what you do in bed kind of thing. What do you do in bed? And that's a little intimidating. Like, I didn't really feel it was their business. They asked if she had ever been to the Redskins Lounge, which was a local gay bar in D.C.

They also asked her about some of her friends. And so they'd ask, do you know John Smith? Do you know blah blah? And they kept asking me more names. There were mostly gay people? All gay people. Yeah. The questions just kept coming.

But little did she know, they kind of already knew the answers. Madeline Trez was born November 27, 1932 in Brooklyn, New York. She was admitted to George Washington University in September 1950. Madeline occupied a third floor apartment at 2007 H Street Northwest for a period. The government had actually been compiling a report on Madeline. They'd spoken to anyone who knew her. Friends, classmates, teachers. She's an ambitious, honest, and responsible girl. She seems to get along well with all people.

She was young and sat around in blue jeans a lot. She did not like Washington because of the segregation here. Parties that we've attended. She would drink an occasional beer. She was very mannish. She dressed and parted her hair like men. I understand that she dressed as a man for about six months. She speaks in a low monotone bass voice. I have seen her wear tailored suits and a short lesbian type haircut. She struck me as being a harder looking dame as I've ever seen. I've been told she's a lesbian.

Madeline walked out of the interview shaken and angry. She considered it the most demeaning experience of her life. She compared it to what she imagined had taken place in Nazi Germany. And she knew something bad might be coming. So she decided to take a drastic step. I ended up resigning. I did not fight it. She has to resign rather than face potential public exposure. This ended her promising career as an economist at the Department of Commerce. But the impact of the investigation on her life didn't stop.

The investigation follows her. She applies for a Fulbright fellowship and wins it, but is not able to get it because her file has been flagged as lesbian. She doesn't just lose a job, she essentially loses her chosen career. And she ends up moving to San Francisco and she goes to law school and becomes a civil rights attorney. Madeline's experience was not unique. She was one of thousands of victims of a purge of gay and lesbian people ordered at the highest levels of the U.S. government,

a program spurred by a panic that destroyed careers and lives and lasted for over 40 years. Today, it's known as the Lavender Scare. You know, it's talked about usually during Pride Month, and it's talked about as a piece of LGBT history. But it's not just a piece of LGBT history, right? It's a piece of American history. The Lavender Scare happened at the same time as the Red Scare, the Cold War period when

thousands of Americans were accused of having ties with communism and the Soviet Union. But the Lavender Scare was also about domestic partisan politics. Publicly demonizing gay and lesbian people was a way of trying to win votes to take power. This was an era where the rights and lives of LGBTQ people were used like a political football. It was the start of a pattern in American society that we're watching play out even today. It impacted elections and presidential elections. It's often not seen in that context. And a quick note, in this episode, we'll mostly be using the terms gay, lesbian, and homosexual when referring to people. We're doing this for historical accuracy, because those were the terms used by most people to self-identify, and by the U.S. government. Okay, so in this episode, we're going to look back at one of the darkest chapters in American history.

We'll meet the people who started the Lavender Scare, the many who kept it going, and and you're listening to ThruLine. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time, mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Part 1. The Birth of a Panic. Ladies and gentlemen, tonight as we celebrate the 141st birthday of one of the greatest men in American history, I would like to be able to talk about what a glorious day today is in the history of the world. It's February 9th, 1950, Wheeling, West Virginia. A senator from Wisconsin gets up to give a speech at a gathering of the Republican Women's Club. It's a celebration of Abraham Lincoln's birthday. But he doesn't want to talk about Lincoln.

The great difference between our Western Christian world and the atheistic communist world is not political. It's moral. There isn't a recording of the speech. It's being read here by an actor. But it is fire and brimstone, apocalyptic, a call to action. Today we are engaged in a final all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time. And ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down. They are truly down. The senator works the crowd into a patriotic fervor. Then he stops speaking in broad terms and gets specific, very specific. I have here in my hand a list of 205. A list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department. The senator from Wisconsin was named Joseph McCarthy.

And that list, which he showed to no one, may as well have been a bomb. The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because our only powerful potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this nation. It didn't take long for McCarthy's fiery speech in West Virginia to become national news. It's the moment when Joseph McCarthy goes from being a kind of unknown junior senator from Wisconsin that nobody paid much attention to, to this sort of media star. This is David K. Johnson. I'm a professor in the history department at the University of South Florida. He also wrote the definitive book on this history. It's called The Lavender Scare,

the Cold War persecution of gays and lesbians in the federal government. And he says this speech came to define Joseph McCarthy and that moment in American history. We call the period the McCarthy era now because of him. Joseph McCarthy was 41 at the time of the speech, serving his first term in the Senate. And suddenly people all across the country knew his name. He was a Marine, a veteran of World War II, a tough, hard-nosed politician who was not known for making friends across the aisle. He drank a lot and sometimes resorted to violence. He was once accused of assaulting a reporter. And he was a fanatical anti-communist. So when he presented this list in his speech and the entire country heard about it, naturally, the next question was, who's on the list?

The press and eventually, you know, his colleagues in Congress wanted to see the list. A few weeks later, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, McCarthy gave another speech where he started to spell out the details. It turns out there weren't 205 people because the number kept changing. And they also all weren't card-carrying communists. And there was another key detail from the list that was confirmed by a State Department official later. And it turned out that several on this list were actually homosexuals that had been removed

from the State Department because they considered them to be security risks. That's really the origin of socialism to a substantial degree in one form or another. Socialism has spread the shadow of human regimentation over most of the nations of the earth, and the shadow is encroaching upon our own liberty. Joseph McCarthy's list and the paranoia about communism began a few years after World War II. The U.S. and the Soviet Union had emerged from that war as dominant world powers. And though they'd been allies against Nazi Germany, they were now enemies, one capitalist and one communist, each seeing the other as an existential threat. The communist fifth columnists among us are working for world dictatorship.

To accomplish this, their strategy is to undermine the confidence of our people in the American system and the principles on which it stands. This is from a 1955 education film called The Responsibilities of American Citizenship. It captures the feeling that around every corner was a communist trying to bring down the American way of life. Even if there were only one communist in the State Department, that would still be one communist, too many. That's Joseph McCarthy. He was using this paranoia about communism to constantly fan the flames of a conspiracy theory. Our nation may well die.

Our nation may well die. And I ask you, who caused it? Was it loyal Americans or was it traitors in our government? And so when it came out that gays and lesbians were on his list, it seeded an idea that somehow they were especially susceptible to the communist threat. The official rationale was that they could be blackmailed by communists. It wasn't that they were communists themselves, but because they were hiding, presumably, therefore vulnerable to blackmail. In other words, the thinking was that gay and lesbian government workers would be easy targets for Soviet spies because they didn't want to be outed.

Now, that alone played on U.S. cultural homophobia, the assumption that being outed would be worse than committing treason. But that wasn't where the rationale ended. There were lots of other ways in which communists and homosexuals were kind of conflated. They're both groups that are considered psychologically disturbed, evidence of some sort of mental weakness. In fact, in 1952, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, the American Psychiatric Association's defining publication, listed homosexuality as a mental illness. Because no sane person would be a communist, and no sane person would be attracted to members of the same sex, right? There's something wrong

with these people. Joseph McCarthy said that too. He said, you'll find that any active communist is twisted mentally or physically in some way, which was a way to draw a connection between the two groups. In retrospect, that association between communism and homosexuality that's made at that moment is completely bizarre, really. I mean, it's illogical. This is Margot Canaday. She's a history professor at Princeton who teaches about gender and sexuality. And she's author of the book Queer Career, Sexuality and Work in Modern America.

It's spoken enough that it becomes a sort of natural kind of connection. There's a sort of natural assertion that's made that, you know, then it becomes sort of natural kind of connection. There's a sort of natural assertion that's made that, you know, then it becomes sort of, okay, we think about communism and homosexuality together. McCarthy's list and the paranoia around communism during the start of the Cold War were the flints that sparked the lavender scare. But the homophobia it struck against had hardened over decades. I think in retrospect, it seems like a switch that is suddenly flipped. But it is actually something that is building over a period of time. I would say it's not the case that gay people are new to state officials,

but World War II does make them visible in a different way. People talk about, certainly in Washington and a lot of other major cities, a period of kind of openness and visibility for the gay community, particularly during World War II. World War II was a transformational event in American history. Almost the entire country had to suddenly focus on fighting a war overseas. Millions of people entered the armed forces or industries supporting the armed forces. The sudden change made space for all kinds of new openness. And this was true for gay and lesbian people too. Men and women being taken out of their small towns, they're brought into major cities,

some of them are sent overseas, they're put into same-sex environments, and they are able to find other people like themselves. There are, you know, gay bars that are flourishing in Washington and New York and San Francisco and these ports where the soldiers are moving through. Our cities, our factories, and our farms are today undamaged and productive. It was a fairly open period. We can now concentrate our thoughts and our energies on the building of a prosperous and secure peacetime

America. There's a kind of culture of sexual permissiveness during World War II that I think, you know, starts to be an element of concern. With increased visibility came increased scrutiny. There were more and more voices raising concern about changing sexual norms. A paranoia was growing that gays and lesbians were taking over cities, that they were a hidden threat in the shadows, just like communists. A lavender brush and a red brush. The sort of idea that they're both kind of a threat to traditional American values, the family and the sort of traditional political values. There's this sort of notion of it's this mysterious and lurking and malignant force

that threatens the very notion of homosexuality. The CBS News survey shows that two out of three Americans look upon homosexuals with disgust, discomfort, or fear. So after the war, you have a lot of states that pass sexual psychopath laws, a lot of concern about sexual psychopaths roaming the streets and threatening children in particular. You see that in films. That's the difference between us and the ordinary man, Philip. They talk about committing the perfect crime, but nobody does it. Films like Alfred Hitchcock's Rope.

Nobody commits a murder just for the experiment of does it. Films like Alfred Hitchcock's Rope. Nobody commits a murder just for the experiment of committing it. Where you have a very upper class gay couple in New York who commit a murder just for the fun of it. Nobody except us. By being openly gay you had flouted moral conventions and laws, and therefore it was kind of a slippery slope, and it could end up in murder. By the time Joseph McCarthy gave that first speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, the United States was already deeply suspicious of gay people. So it didn't take long for other senators to take his accusations and run with them.

There's a whole series of congressional investigations into the employment of homosexuals and other sex perverts in the government in 1950. That's what it's called? Yes. Wow. One of those investigations, the biggest one, was called the Hoey Committee. It was bipartisan, and it set out to answer the following question. Are there homosexuals in government agencies, and do they pose a threat to national security?

This was a serious Senate investigation. They sent out questionnaires to 53 civilian departments and agencies in the government, plus all branches of the military, basically asking them how many gays and lesbians they had in their ranks. They tried to get actual names, you know, lists of names. Wanted to compile a kind of master list of homosexual employees. They also called witnesses, psychiatrists, vice squad officers, members of the military. What effect do you think, generally, the practice of homosexuality has on the willpower and moral

fiber of individuals? I think that is a hard question to answer, sir. I think that would vary in the individual as to his own willpower and moral fiber. Of course, certainly in our society, it would be a weakening in the moral fiber because we consider it wrong. There was almost no one who stood up to object to it. The Hoey Committee investigation went on for half a year. And on December 15, 1950, a little over 10 months after McCarthy's speech in West Virginia, it released a report. Coming up, how that report set in motion a government purge that would last nearly half a century. Hi, this is Denise Fischer from Germany. You are listening to ThruLine from NPR.

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Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government Interim Report. December 15, 1950. So they issue a report at the end of the year, in December 1950. Homosexuals and other sex perverts are not proper persons to be employed in government. That concludes categorically and definitively that gay people are a threat to national security. Testimony on this phase of the inquiry was taken from representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Intelligence Services of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. All of these agencies are in complete agreement that sex perverts in government constitute security risks. The Soviet Union has an active program of finding these people and targeting them and blackmailing them. The pervert is easy prey to the blackmailer. They also gave other reasons

for getting rid of gays and lesbians. They said they were untrustworthy, they gossiped a lot. And also that they flouted the law or that they didn't have respect for the law because in many places homosexuality was illegal. Sodomy was against the law or that they didn't have respect for the law because in many places, homosexuality was illegal. Sodomy was against the law. And so if you would disregard that law, what else will you disregard? They would recruit other people. They would hire other gay people. One homosexual can pollute a government office.

So they were just generally undesirable and unsuitable. The conclusions of the Hoey report were made without any tangible proof to support its claims. There was no evidence that any gay man or lesbian was being blackmailed by foreign agents. And to this day, that's still true. But it wasn't long before more politicians, beyond just Senator McCarthy, took up the cause. Ike for president, Ike for president, Ike for president, Ike for president. You like Ike, I like Ike, everybody likes Ike for president. Hang out the banner, beat the drum, we'll take Ike to Washington. In 1952, war hero General Dwight D. Eisenhower ran for president on the Republican ticket with Richard Nixon as his running mate. General, how would you clean up the mess in Washington? My answer? It's not a one-agency mess or even a one-department mess.

It's a top-to-bottom mess. And I promise we will clean it up from top to bottom. After 20 years of Democratic presidents, they were desperate for a GOP victory and open to any strategy that would give them an advantage. The Republicans' campaign slogan in 1952 is, let's clean house. Let's get rid of all of these undesirables who have infiltrated the federal government. And it's a vague enough term.

I am proud of the millions of fine, good, honest, decent, loyal people that work for the federal government. And I say that the best thing that can be done for them is to kick out the crooks and the others that have besmirched their reputations in Washington, D.C., and that's what we're going to do. So that includes communists, includes sex perverts, and any other undesirable that you want to talk about. And when Eisenhower won the presidency, he and his vice president quickly

delivered on their campaign promises. Whereas the interests of the national security require that all persons privileged to be employed in the departments and agencies of the government shall be reliable, trustworthy, of good conduct and character, and of complete, unswerving loyalty to the United States. Within months of taking office, President Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which explicitly states that the people who engage in so-called sexual perversion can't serve in any branches of the government. The order also barred anyone deemed especially susceptible to blackmail. takes what had been this kind of political issue begun by McCarthy on Capitol Hill and makes it federal government policy. So it affects not only all civil servants in the federal government, which is then the nation's largest employer,

but also anyone who has a security clearance with the federal government. Every civil servant is subject to security investigation. Washington had become a place of suspicion and fear. Something about Miss X pushes me away. Some women sought to dress more femininely. He has a feminine complexion, a peculiar girlish walk. Male colleagues avoided each other and paraded their wives. A deep voice, an unusual face for a woman, not at all feminine. Did you see what she's wearing? I don't know. And like a scene straight out of George Orwell's 1984, co-workers started to watch

each other and report one another to the FBI and department heads of security Orwell's 1984. Coworkers started to watch each other and report one another to the FBI and department heads of security. There's one case I found where a woman in the State Department, she just suspected that maybe her boss was a lesbian. And she was concerned about her because of the odd shape of her lips and because she would often have telephone conversations

with other women. And so the State Department began an investigation and they determined that there was a dispute between this woman and her boss and so it was, you know, she was kind of a disgruntled employee. But that didn't stop the investigators from continuing to use her as a source. They still took her accusations seriously. They asked if she could identify any other people and followed up on her suggestions. If there were any rumors, they could open what they called a full field investigation. They would interview family members, co-workers, friends, neighbors, former teachers.

I mean, it was a pretty serious deal. An entire system of surveillance was put in place to uncover people's most intimate relations. One of the things that the FBI was doing was checking fingerprints with police departments. Local police scoured bars. The Postal Service tracked correspondents. The U.S. Park Police monitored parks and sent undercover cops to bait would-be lovers. So if you were, let's say, a gay man who was entrapped or arrested by police in a cruising area or a gay man or lesbian who was caught in a bar raid and you were arrested and fingerprinted, that came to be part of a national database. Subject is white, 23 years, resident of the district. Clerk, typist, civil service notified.

Subject is white, 24 years, resident of the district. CAF 2 clerk admits to being bisexual, wanting men only when drinking. This information then became the basis for federal employers to investigate or terminate someone's employment. Information received indicating the employee was a homosexualist after a thorough investigation. I hereby accept an undesirable discharge for the good of the service. His resignation was demanded. Employee resigned. People like Madeline Tress.

It's a very scary experience. I really have tried to block this. People are still humiliated. There's still a lot of denial. Most people didn't challenge their dismissals. They just stopped showing up to work one day. It was a pain and fear suffered in silence. There didn't seem to be another option until one man dared to bring the ruckus.

We are seeking our human dignity, our equality and our acceptance as the homosexuals that we are and have a right to be. So Frank Kameny is a total original. I mean, he's almost hard to describe. I have never sought to adjust myself to society, but with considerable success, I've sought to adjust society to me. He was so unconventional and such an iconoclast and such a maverick. And he just had a very strong sense that he had been wronged and it wasn't acceptable.

Frank Kameny didn't set out to become one of the country's first gay activists. From an early age, his eyes were fixed on the sky, gazing at the stars above with his telescope. He had always wanted to be an astronomer since he was a kid. And he made that dream a reality. He got his Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard in 1956, the year before Sputnik would kickstart the space race.

Dr. Kavanagh. He eventually found his way to a government job at the Army Map Service. Helping the Army map the globe, essentially, so they can more accurately target their nuclear missiles. His career was soaring, and his love life was too, having embraced his homosexuality later in life. I felt almost a compulsive drive to make up for lost time.

And then, it all came crashing down. In the mid-1950s, he was arrested in a restroom. In a known cruising area in San Francisco. And he lost his job in the government as a result. But from the very beginning, Frank never conceded. He's brought into a room and asked, the civil service has information that you are a homosexual. What comment do you

care to make? And as a fairly nerdy scientist, he didn't understand, like, why do you care about my Frank Kameny refused to resign. Even when his security clearance was removed and he was ultimately dismissed, he continued to fight. He appeals it administratively. He writes letters to Congress and to the president. Eventually he gets an attorney. He decided to take legal action to fight his termination, which is something gay people in the 1950s and 1960s, when they lost their jobs,

they didn't think about what my legal redress is. He files suit, loses at every level. He makes an appeal to the Supreme Court, which denied they don't even want to hear it, the case. Despite all these setbacks, Kameny started to change the narrative. In his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, he says, this is not really about national security. You know, I'm not a threat to national security. This is not really about, you know, morality or my private life. He says, this is about civil rights,

that I'm being discriminated against just as religious and racial minorities are. I'm being treated as a second-class citizen. Kameny made the case that sexuality is a civil rights issue years before Stonewall or the gay liberation movement. It was a big deal. And while it didn't change anything for his case. Kameny, you know, I think just by temperament was a fighter. And so he mobilized initially to fight his own termination and the denial of his own security clearance. And when those things failed, then to fight other people's.

He goes on to co-found a chapter of the Mattachine Society, which becomes the first gay rights organization in Washington, D.C. And by 1965, they're actually picketing in front of the White House. Demanding equal treatment. It's one of the first public protests for gay rights in the country. It starts off small, but Kameny knew he needed to get louder and prouder. Frank Kameny famously saw Stokely Carmichael one day on television. He was inspired by the Black Power slogan, Black is Beautiful. And he said, we need a slogan like this.

And he comes up with, gay is good. Gay is good. The slogan stuck and became one of the rallying cries for the burgeoning gay and lesbian movements of the 1960s and 70s. After I'm gone, I am remembered for absolutely nothing else. I want to be remembered for having coined that slogan, gay is good. And all the while, Kameny continued to help other government employees be investigated for their sexuality. And even though he wasn't a lawyer, he provided counsel, Kameny style. This is so powerful at this moment when I think gay people kind of expected to be shameful and apologetic.

And instead, he was bombastic, kind of aggressive, almost harassing, funny. I mean, he really wore down the bureaucrats. And when his clients were willing, he'd call a press conference. And they'd all have on these giant gay is good buttons. And Kameny would walk up and he'd say, you know, we come into this room and into this hearing with our heads held high as proud homosexuals who intend to go on being just that. Kameny believed his activism on the streets and in the courts would take hold. And so he took on every client that he could. Coming up, Kameny gets the call he's been waiting for. This is Sam Yamasta calling from Palo Alto, California, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

Part 3. The Scarefalls A claim of possible embarrassment might, of course, be a vague way of referring to some specific potential interference with an agency's performance. But it might also be a smokescreen, hiding personal antipathies or moral judgments which are excluded by statute as grounds for dismissal. In 1963, a budget analyst named Clifford Norton is fired from his job at NASA. Also arrested in a gay cruising area in Washington. He wants to fight back. And guess who shows up to help him? Frank Kameny. Kameny works with him and works with the ACLU. Together they fight his case all the way up the Federal Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. What you're hearing is from the ruling from that case, known as Norton v. Macy.

A reviewing court must at least be able to discern some reasonably foreseeable, specific connection between an employee's potentially embarrassing conduct and the efficiency of the service. Once the connection is established, then it is for the agency and the commission to decide whether it outweighs the loss to the service of a particular competent employee. In the instant case, Apple Lee has shown us no specific connection. The court basically says to the government, look, your justifications for firing someone just for being gay or lesbian are not good enough, no matter how embarrassing you find it. And that is the great thing about the courts.

They want a rational explanation and a justification for this. And they didn't see one. And this is where we see Kameny's years of fighting starting to kind of push the lavender scare back in terms of the civil service. The Norton case comes down at the beginning of July 1969. So it's essentially the same week as the Stonewall riots in New York, which are often credited with the beginning of the gay rights movement.

And this was actually one of its first major victories. On July 3rd, 1975, six years after the Norton ruling, Frank Kameny received a phone call from the chief counsel of the Civil Service Commission. He told them that they would be issuing new regulations that didn't specifically bar homosexuals from employment in the government. Even though individual cases of discrimination still did happen, officially, the Civil Service Commission was no longer able to fire someone just for being gay or lesbian. The witch hunt was basically over. It lingers. The Lavender Scare lingers for another, basically for another 20 years.

Because the ban continues in the security agencies. So NSA, FBI, CIA. The Foreign Service, they continue to discriminate against gay people. You know, the security clearance issue, which, again, is based on this notion that gay people are blackmailable, that they're not trustworthy, that they don't have good judgment, that remains an issue. Basically, if you are gay or lesbian and trying to get a job that requires a security clearance, they can still reject you

based on the same reasons the Civil Service Commission would have used. And what happens in the 70s and 80s is that more and more government jobs require security clearances. And Kameny himself actually believes this is a backdoor way of stopping the liberalization of government policy on gay employees. And so he continues to be mobilized against that. At this point, Kameny sets his sights on fighting security clearance cases.

You can hire a lawyer and prevail, most likely, but it's expensive, it's slow, and there's also an issue where employers don't want the hassle. And so if they're looking at somebody who's gay and going to create a security clearance issue, they just may not do it. It continues to be an issue into the 90s. In fact, in the 1980s, David K. Johnson was personally impacted by the security clearance policy. When I graduated from Georgetown, I took the Foreign Service exam, and I passed it, which is not easy to do, apparently. No, it's not. But it was the 80s and there was a sort of resurgence of the Lavender Scare under the Reagan administration. And the State Department had always been homophobic and continued to be in the 80s. And so I decided not to pursue that. Because you genuinely thought, like, this could be bad,

like, this isn't worth it. I knew they, you know, were still basically weeding out homosexuals, even in the 80s. Yesterday, President Clinton rewrote the rules that spell out who gets to see government secrets. Civil liberties and gay rights groups are cheering about another historic part of the president's order. As of yesterday, government officials may no longer refuse policies around security clearances in the entire government. And saying explicitly that sexual orientation cannot be a reason for denying a security clearance.

This is how Frank Kameny reacted to it in an NPR interview. I think it's crucially important in bringing closure to this whole issue by implementing not merely a tacit, quiet, unformalized retreat from the government's role as a hostile adversary, but bringing it around to what government ought to be, and that is an affirmative protector of the rights of its citizens, including its gay citizens. By the time the Lavender Scare officially ended, thousands of people had been fired or forced to resign.

The State Department alone is on record as having fired 1,400 suspected gay men and lesbians through the 60s. And so if you extrapolate for the whole federal government, that's 5,000 to 10,000 people who probably lost their jobs. And that doesn't count all the people who didn't apply or all the people who lost, you know, security clearances or didn't get promoted. It's also important to take in that this was not just about a job. People's entire lives were devastated by the lavender scare.

In the National Archives, I found the case of Andrew Ferencz, who was a State Department employee in Paris. You know, a young, budding diplomat with a promising career. He had a roommate in Paris. Apparently they were romantically involved as well. And he's brought in for an interrogation and confronted with this. And he goes home after the interrogation, goes to their apartment in Paris,

and turns on the gas stove and commits suicide. Even after the lavender scare ended, Frank Kameny continued advocating for LGBTQ people who experienced discrimination, even though it cost him personally. He remained financially on the edge his entire life. You know, I remember talking to actually somebody who was a lawyer who was a colleague, a younger colleague of Kameny's and had kind of been trained by Kameny to do security clearance work. And this gentleman telling me his memory of going to Kameny's house and remembering, you know, how worn the upholstery was and sort of, you know, the springs sticking through the upholstery on the sofa. He died in 2011.

So we have moved ahead over the last almost exactly half a century from the depths of ignominy to, well, we have a way to go yet. This was from one of his last public speaking engagements. I mean, a meeting like this in a government building would be inconceivable. Absolutely inconceivable. So we're on our way. I'm glad to have been of help in doing it. Thank you.

Madeline Tress, the economist whose career was ruined by the lavender scare, would go on to become an activist, an employment attorney, who represented dozens of gay and lesbian people who were discriminated against. She died in 2009. Oh, and Joseph McCarthy, he died in 1957, never seeing the end of the Cold War

or lavender scare. seeing the end of the Cold War or Lavender Scare. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the 988-SUICIDE-IN-CRISIS lifeline by calling or texting 988. That's it for this week's show. I'm Randab the Tvata. I'm Ramtin Adabloui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me. And.

Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Yolanda Sanguin. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Sasha Crawford-Holland.

Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel, and it was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani, Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara. Also thanks to Tara Neal, Micah Ratner, Johannes Durge, Will Chase, Susie Cummings, Ida Porassat, and Anya Grunman. Thank you to Austin Horn, Alex Spearman, Anya Steinberg, Devin Karayama, Casey Miner, Julie Kane, Lawrence Wu, Maiko Albagrenga, Zarina de Vinagracia, and Christina Kim for their voiceover work. And as always, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write

us at ThruLine at NPR.org. Thanks for listening.