Andrew S.

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

would culminate in the 1969 Stonewall Inn.

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

acknowledges so many documents became unclassified, he overlooks the continued problems

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?