Biden issues proclamation on 70th anniversary of Lavender Scare
President Joe Biden issued a formal proclamation Wednesday on the 70th anniversary of the Lavender Scare, a moral panic that caused investigations and firings of thousands of known or suspected gay men and lesbians who were working for the U.S.
government. “For so many members of the LGBTQI+ community, hate, discrimination, and isolation throughout our country’s history have denied them the full promise of America,” Biden said. “The Lavender Scare epitomized — and institutionalized — this injustice.” The president said “we must reflect honestly on the darkest chapters of our story” to continue building on the “tremendous progress” that has been made since the Lavender Scare.
At the same time, he said, “the struggle for equal justice is not over” for LGBTQ people in America, noting the “wave of discriminatory laws that target them — especially transgender children — and that echo the hateful stereotypes and stigma” encountered by gay men and lesbians during the Cold War era Beginning with the State Department’s purge of gay and lesbian employees in 1947, which was codified across the federal government by an executive order from President Dwight D.
Eisenhower in 1953, the Lavender Scare presaged and then paralleled the anti-communist McCarthyist crusades. The senator himself was prone to using often-unsubstantiated allegations of homosexuality or communist sympathies to smear political opponents, once proclaiming, “If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you’ve got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker.” Conflating homosexuality with communism, or with harboring sympathies to communist foreign adversaries, was common at the time.
