--- title: The History You Didn't Learn: The Lavender Scare | TIME description: The History You Didn't Learn is a series that sheds light on past events that may have been omitted, misleading, or just downright wrong in our history education in school. canonical: https://time.com/video/7jWjdOdm/ og:title: The History You Didn't Learn: The Lavender Scare og:description: The History You Didn't Learn is a series that sheds light on past events that may have been omitted, misleading, or just downright wrong in our history education in school. og:url: https://time.com/video/7jWjdOdm/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/7jWjdOdm/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The History You Didn't Learn: The Lavender Scare twitter:description: The History You Didn't Learn is a series that sheds light on past events that may have been omitted, misleading, or just downright wrong in our history education in school. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/7jWjdOdm/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # The History You Didn't Learn: The Lavender Scare > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: The History You Didn't Learn: The Lavender Scare [Watch (HLS stream): The History You Didn't Learn: The Lavender Scare](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/7jWjdOdm.m3u8) (9:50)  _Published 2020-12-22. The History You Didn't Learn is a series that sheds light on past events that may have been omitted, misleading, or just downright wrong in our history education in school._ --- Jul 28, 2023 4:06 AM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [The History You Didn't Learn: The Black Panthers' Health Programs](/video/28opNCMF/) ### The History You Didn't Learn: The Black Panthers' Health Programs [The History You Didn't Learn: Latinas in the Labor Movement](/video/Y0oOfDDS/) ### The History You Didn't Learn: Latinas in the Labor Movement [The History You Didn't Learn: The NYC School Boycott](/video/I4zgXOYu/) ### The History You Didn't Learn: The NYC School Boycott --- ## Transcript Kind: captions Language: en-US I was flown to Washington for the first time, for interviews, they polygraphed me. They asked me if I'd ever had sex with anyone of the same gender. Well, at that time I hadn't. And so I replied no. But it caused the needle to go up and down quite a bit. But I danced around it and I got hired. And the subject didn't come up again until six years later when they essentially arrested me. When you learned about the 1950s in history class, you probably covered McCarthyism and The Red Scare, when the government rounded up anyone they suspected of being a communist and put them on trial. But you might not have learned about The Lavender Scare, when possibly thousands of people were fired from government jobs for being gay. The Lavender Scare was this fear that really permeated American culture in the 1950s, during the Cold War. It was this fear that gay men and Lesbians had infiltrated the federal government. And it really gets started by Joseph McCarthy and his rhetoric about subversives in the State Department. Communists were not the only people he was concerned about. He was concerned about homosexuals there as well. It was believed that gay men and lesbians were a threat to national security because they were in the closet. Presumably subject to blackmail by foreign agents. And once gay people were portrayed as disloyal, the Red Scare morphed into the Lavender Scare. There was not a single example of one American citizen who had betrayed government secrets under blackmail. And yet there was this government policy that excluded all gay men and lesbians from government jobs. It really set off this witch hunt within the federal government and then beyond, to track down gay men and lesbians and remove them from any positions within the government. Every government employee under the Eisenhower Security Program was subject to a security investigation. if there was anything suspicious in your record, if you were a female employee and you wore unusual clothing or you got a lot of calls from women, the security officials would start investigating. They would talk to neighbors and coworkers and family members and former bosses as part of what they called a full field investigation. And if they had reason to believe you were gay, they would call you into their offices. They would interrogate you. Usually the first question was, "The Civil Service Commission has information that you are a homosexual. What comment do you care to make about this?" And people didn't know what to do. It's impossible to know how many people were affected by this policy because many people were forced to resign voluntarily rather than risk exposure by fighting back. And beyond just losing their jobs, some lost their lives I found evidence in the National Archives that a guy named Andrew Ference who worked in the U.S. Embassy in Paris. It was his dream job. He had a partner that he lived with. I'm not sure how they found out, but they interrogated him about his relationship with his roommate. Quite intensely. And after one of those interrogations, he went home to their apartment in Paris, and he turned on the gas oven and asphyxiated himself. The effect of the Lavender Scare is that the gay community is really under siege This government policy kind of emboldened police forces all over the country. They saw it as their duty to help arrest these people, and they would funnel names to the Civil Service Commission. So the gay community in the '50s is kind of living in fear. You didn't know who your friends were. And you had to be very, very careful. The hunt for communists led by Joseph McCarthy ended in 1957, but the persecution of gay people in government continued for decades after. It becomes part of the standard government policy and is there until a few courageous gay people and women start fighting it. Frank Kameny is fired in 1957. He's this PhD from Harvard in astronomy. He gets a government job with the Army Map Service, and they fired him, and he's kind of a nerdy scientist. He doesn't understand why the government is interested in his sex life. And so he fights it, he thinks it’s a mistake. He writes all kinds of letters and gets nowhere. He decides to sue the federal government, to take them to court. And loses. He tries to take it to the Supreme Court, when he loses. But in the process of doing that, he writes his own brief where he explains his point of view. And he says, "Well, this is not really about national security. This is not really about morality. He says, "This is about civil rights. This is about my civil rights. I'm being treated as a second-class citizen.” But he perseveres. He forms an organization in Washington, DC. By 1965, they're picketing in front of the White House. The first time openly gay men, lesbians all claiming they're being treated wrongly by the federal government. And by 1969, they're winning cases. The federal courts say to the Civil Service Commission, you can't prove a connection between these people's off-duty conduct or their sexual orientation and their ability to perform their jobs. And so you have to end this policy. The Civil Service Commision changed its policy in 1975, but agencies that required security clearances, like the NSA and FBI, continued to discriminate until president Bill Clinton signed two executive orders banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in government employment and the granting of security clearances. So it's not until the '90s that the policy finally ends. And it's because of this activism by gays and lesbians. It’s also thanks to this activism that Jamie Shoemaker, a former linguist for the national security agency was able to get his job back after losing it in 1980. They read me my rights and said we understand you're leading a gay lifestyle. They removed my badge. And they said they would adjudicate the case, and they would discuss it at the upper levels and reach some sort of decision. Shoemaker then got in touch with Frank Kameny who took on his case. it took months of fighting the decision before shoemaker had a chance of getting his job back with the condition that he tell his family he was gay. He accepted. All of them responded absolutely positively. They did not know I was gay. But they didn't feel that it altered anything. And very shortly after, I was sitting back at my desk. Even today as the Senate seems poised to confirm a first openly gay cabinet member, there are still so many examples of discrimination against lgbtq people. There are thousands of transgender people who currently serve, including in combat conditions, and so to have the President of the United States announce a ban on transgender people serving was devastating, not just to those individuals who are currently serving and those who are looking to serve their country, but also to the military itself. The decision came so abruptly and it created a mass confusion. And because of that confusion I didn’t know what I was going to do. But I persevered to stay in and made sure I was doing my part cuz I was never going to be a burden just because of who I am Alonna Lavonh joined the Navy as a sailor in 2017, right after the obama administration ended the restrictions that prevented transgender people from openly serving. Because she was openly serving before the ban, she has so far not been personally affected, but says she sees the impact it had on the military as a whole. it was very heartbreaking. I feel like it has majorly lessened our forces. personally I have heard you know people say oh, because you’re trans and trying to be in the military, oh, you know you’ll be gone because of your surgery. And yet, I have not seen anybody trans, gay, lesbian, etc, show any reasons of why they could not serve. I do see parallels between the Lavender Scare and the transgender military ban. The goal in both of those was to demonize a community. It was to send a message that it's not okay to be who you are. And it was effective. Because we know that there are a lot of people who in military service who are transgender, who haven't been able to be open about their lives and who risked their futures in government service if they were to be out. 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