In article <t2fn3c$3jbnm$214@news.freedyn.de>
<governor.swill@gmail.com> wrote:
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> Very happy to see Swallwell fail after his immature ignorant behavior with a Chink whore spy.
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> Monkey Pox, right on time to give Democrats an excuse to cheat in the next election.

During the 1950s, the State Department began to scrutinize
public servants in its ranks, methodically scanning personnel
files and interviewing suspected threats. The goal was to root
out �immoral,� �scandalous� and �dangerous� government
employees�people whose personal conduct put the entire nation at
risk.

You might think the targets were suspected Communists�after all,
it was the height of the Red Scare and Cold War paranoia. But
the State Department�s targets weren�t suspected Communists, and
the sweep wasn�t run by Joseph McCarthy. Instead, LGBT people
were in the crosshairs, accused of unfitness to serve. Condemned
as �perverts� and bullied out of their jobs, they were
systematically targeted for their sexual orientation.

The period�considered as targeted and as widespread as the
concurrent Red Scare�is now known as the Lavender Scare. Between
the late 1940s and early 1960s, an unknown number of LGBT
employees, likely in the thousands, were driven out of their
jobs. Countless others were interrogated and bullied�all in an
attempt to purge State of LGBT people.

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 phrase �lavender lads� to refer to gay men. It was used by
tabloids like Confidential and people like Senator Everett
Dirksen, who was involved in public hearings related to the
Senate purge, and it represented a wider societal tendency to
mock and fear LGBT people.

At the time, homosexuality was a crime, and gay people had long
hidden their sexualities. After World War II, as cities grew,
underground gay cultures began to flourish. Despite the
prevailing view of homosexuality as a mental illness and a sign
of perversion or criminality, gay people started to find one
another at underground bars and clubs. In the meantime, American
culture became more sexually conservative even as more and more
people became aware of homosexuality. This provoked a backlash,
and cities began to more aggressively police sexual expression.

Executive Order 10450
Section 8 of President Dwight D. Eisenhower�s 1953 Executive
Order #10450, �Security Requirements for Government Employment,�
where it states that �sexual perversion� could be used as a fair
reason to terminate someone�s job. At the time, homosexuality
was considered a �sexual perversion�. (Credit: The National
Archives)

So did the State Department. As the federal government began to
persecute suspected Communists, gay people found themselves
being targeted. At the time, many people equated Communism with
homosexuality�people like Senator Joseph McCarthy, who linked
what he considered to be the madness of Communists to the
supposed mental imbalances of gay people.

�Many assumptions about Communists mirrored common beliefs about
homosexuals,� notes National Archives archivist Judith Adkins.
�Both were thought to be morally weak or psychologically
disturbed, both were seen as godless, both purportedly
undermined the traditional family, both were assumed to recruit,
and both were shadowy figures with a secret subculture.�

In an attempt to lock down national security, the State
Department began to actively seek out homosexual employees. As
Congressional hearings about supposed homosexual activity within
the department raged, the intelligence community began
interviewing and pressuring for the resignations of suspected
gay employees. Investigators looked for supposed signs of
homosexuality, like being unmarried, and scrutinized employees�
and potential hires� voices, mannerisms and dress for
stereotypical markers that they might be gay.

�The official rationale wasn�t that homosexuals were Communists,
but that they could be used by Communists,� Johnson told The
University of Chicago in 2004. �A variation on the blackmail
rationale�held that Communists promoted �sex perversion� among
American youth as a way to weaken the country and clear the path
for a Communist takeover.�

As the search for gay State Department employees intensified, so
did the pressure. People were questioned, publicly humiliated
and mocked by investigators. They were encouraged to denounce
others and report suspected homosexuals. And in 1953, President
Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which defined a laundry
list of characteristics as security risks, including �sexual
perversion.� This was interpreted as a ban on homosexual
employees, and even more firings took place. Publicly humiliated
and devastated by the loss of their income and their
reputations, some even killed themselves.

Others, like Frank Kameny, fought back. Fired in 1957, he
petitioned the Supreme Court for relief in recognition of his
civil rights. They declined to take the case, so he picketed the
White House. He fought to counter workplace discrimination for
the rest of his life. Kameny wasn�t the only person galvanized
by the public targeting of LGBT people�in 1969, the Stonewall
Riots made gay rights a front-page issue, and the movement
Kameny helped start and the Lavender Scare helped foment has
flourished ever since.

The scare lasted until the 1960s, when investigations slowed.
Only in the 1970s was the ban on gay intelligence community
members relaxed, and it took until 1995 for another executive
order, signed by President Bill Clinton, to explicitly state
that the government may not discriminate based on sexual
orientation when it comes to granting access to classified
information. By then, countless gay people had been reminded for
years that their participation in the State Department was not
wanted�and that they would be treated as second-class citizens
if they tried to serve their country.

Shortly before leaving office, Secretary of State John Kerry
made a public apology on behalf of the State Department for the
persecution of LGBT employees. �These actions were wrong then,
just as they would be wrong today,� he said. The apology has
since been removed from the State Department�s website�a
reminder that struggles over LGBT rights are anything but relics
of the past.

Today, memories of the Lavender Scare are fading as the people
it targeted grow older. The experiences of others, who never
told their stories for fear of being kicked out of their jobs,
too, will never be known.

Homosexuals are a cancer in any society. Cure the cancer, get
rid of them.

https://www.history.com/news/state-department-gay-employees-
outed-fired-lavender-scare