Opinion | NASA Refused to Cancel James Webb. Good.
James Webb, the former head of NASA, has been accused of complicity in the Lavender Scare. But it’s not that simple, argues author Jamie Kirchick. | NASA Opinion by James Kirchick 02/17/2023 04:30 AM EST Link CopiedJames Kirchick is author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, which was a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book of 2022.Frank Kameny was a 32-year-old astronomer with a Ph.D.
from Harvard when, in December 1957, the Army Map Service fired him due to his sexual orientation. It was only two months after the Soviet Union had launched its Sputnik satellite, inaugurating the “space race,” but the Department of Defense’s cartographic agency was simultaneously engaged in another Cold War-era struggle that apparently took precedence: the purge of homosexuals from every nook and cranny of the federal government.Beginning in 1947 with the firing of gay employees from the State Department and widening in 1953 with an Executive Order signed by President Dwight Eisenhower, the “Lavender Scare” resulted in some 5,000 to 10,000 gay employees losing their jobs due to the belief that they constituted “security risks” liable to blackmail.
So thoroughgoing was the government’s campaign to eradicate “sexual deviants” that rooting out and firing a gay, Harvard-trained scientist outweighed its interstellar competition with the country’s main geostrategic rival.Kameny became the first gay government employee to challenge his firing in the courts, and while his effort at reinstatement was unsuccessful, he played a crucial role in overturning the government’s anti-gay discrimination.
