During World War II, many men and women left behind the restrictions of rural or small-town life for the first time.
The purge followed an era in which gay people were increasingly finding each other and forming communities in urban America. Dubbed the Lavender Scare, this wave of repression was also bound up with anti-Communism and fueled by the power of congressional investigation. A second scare of the same era has been much slower to make its way into public consciousness, even though it lasted far longer and directly impacted many more lives.īeginning in the late 1940s and continuing through the 1960s, thousands of gay employees were fired or forced to resign from the federal workforce because of their sexuality. The Red Scare, the congressional witch-hunt against Communists during the early years of the Cold War, is a well-known chapter of American history. On December 15, 1950, the Hoey committee released this report, concluding that homosexuals were unsuitable for employment in the Federal Government and constituted security risks in positions of public trust.
