The Lavender Scare
Colfax between Marion & Lafayette
Created By: Teddy
Sponsored By: The Irish Snug
The Lavender Scare, coined by historian David K. Johnson from Senator Everett Dirksen’s use of the term “lavender lad,” was a series of mass firings in the US government, coinciding with the anti-communist purges directed by Joseph McCarthy known as “McCarthyism.”
Homosexuals were viewed as susceptible to blackmail and psychologically unstable. By 1953, President Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450 barring gay people from working in government, which led for over 5,000 gay people being fired from the government. This included people like Frank Kameny, an astronomer fired for being gay, who devoted the rest of his life to the cause of gay rights. Kameny wrote to President Kennedy in 1961, “The homosexuals in this country are … beginning to stand up for their rights and freedoms as citizens… no longer willing to accept their present status as second-class citizens and as second-class human beings; they are neither.”