Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Terrell
Spring 2010
Précis: Johnson, David K. Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in
the Federal Government. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Under the guise of national security, Gays and Lesbians, among other “subversive”
demographics, were removed from many Washington Bureaucracies in the opening years of the
Cold War. David Johnson presents a compelling survey of the federal employment purges during
the Truman and Eisenhower administrations in his monograph which adds to McCarthy era
scholarship in very profound ways. He argues the economic collapse of the 1930s allowed the
Federal Government to expand in unprecedented volume thus creating jobs and attracting those
who wanted to leave smaller towns, join the New Deal movement, and go to school. The
urbanization of Washington from 1930 to 1950 saw the city’s population doubled. Additionally,
Johnson asserts the Red Scare and Lavender Scare were fomented by paranoia rather than
quantitative and qualitative measurements. Lastly, Johnson shows how the incremental removal
of sexual deviants in Washington during the postwar era inspired gay rights movements that
Johnson’s monograph is both a political and cultural study of the mid twentieth century.
By making his case that both aspects of scholarship are intertwined in the early gay rights
movement, the reader is led to believe there are other possible movements with stronger political
and cultural connections than currently associated. Criticism of this work is minimal, but one
does wish Johnson had made the case more directly that sexual deviants and other “immoral”
individuals and demographics were persecuted in the Federal Government, especially in the State
Department, well before the 20th century. Additionally, having been written after 2000 when he
with the gay community and the State Department, something not resolved until May 2009 when
same sex couples received identical benefits packages to their heterosexual colleagues. While
one recognizes the main focus of the book was meant to be targeted at creating a new level of
political history within McCarthy era America, does the absence of these larger points detract
from our understanding of the context that allowed for the rise and dissemination of paranoia that
is quintessential of McCarthyism? Also, did Johnson cover more of the gay vantage of the
period rather than lesbian while also leaving out male machismo ideologies in this monograph?