Historian
David K. Johnson: Exposes the U.S. Government’s Anti-Gay Crusades
Gay
Today, December 31, 2003
http://gaytoday.com/interview/010104in.asp
Interview by Raj Ayyar
Dr. David K. Johnson is the author of one of the most
important American history books of our time: The Lavender Scare: The Cold War
Persecution of Gays and Lesbians by the Federal Government (University of
Chicago Press). It is a carefully documented indictment of anti-gay
demagoguery that turned into a common practice among U.S. politicians over a
half-century ago. Dr. Johnson has provided today’s generation with
disturbing details of the maltreatment that U.S. security agents visited upon
thousands of loyal American citizens, people who endured vile campaigns
against their well-being, conducted by their own government.
Raj Ayyar: How did political demagogues in the
federal government persecute gays during the Cold War Era and what did people
attracted to their own sex suffer at the hands of our government?
David K. Johnson, Ph.D.: In the late 1940s and
early 1950s, Republican demagogues charged that homosexuals had infiltrated
the federal government under the Roosevelt and Truman administrations and that
they posed a threat to national security. They considered communists and
homosexuals both to be morally weak and psychologically disturbed. They also
argued that homosexuals could be used by the communists—blackmailed by
them—into revealing state secrets. This set off a Lavender Scare that
affected the lives of thousands of Americans.
Much of the vast apparatus of the Cold War
loyalty/security system, initiated under the Truman administration and
expanded under the Eisenhower administration, was focused on ferreting out and
removing both communists and homosexuals from government positions. Civil
servants describe horrendous interrogations by government security officials
about their sex lives. Merely associating with “known homosexuals” or
visiting a gay bar was considered strong enough evidence for dismissal.
Raj Ayyar: Historian George Chauncey says that
after reading your remarkable book, “we will never be able to view the
McCarthy Era in the same way again.” While most pundits assume that the late
Republican demagogue, Senator Joseph McCarthy, was trying to ferret out
communists working for the U.S. government, am I right when I say that your
book The Lavender Scare doubtlessly proves otherwise and that Ann Coulter’s
most recent book-wherein she cites McCarthy as a hero and uses him as a
starting point-demonstrates that she’s a hopeless know-nothing?
David K. Johnson: Ann Coulter is only the most
recent and most famous of a growing group of conservative writers bent on
re-habilitating the legacy of Joseph McCarthy. They claim that new evidence
from Soviet archives vindicates the anti-communist crusaders from the 1950s.
In fact, the evidence from the archives is ambiguous at best. As they did in
the 1950s with the famous “pumpkin papers,” these right-wing pundits
engage in a tortured manipulation of the evidence in order to prove their
point.
They, of course, completely ignore how McCarthy and his
allies targeted gays and lesbians as well as communists. When McCarthy made
his initial charges that the State Department harbored known security risks,
the State Department responded by denying that it had uncovered any communists
in its ranks, but admitted that it had fired 91 homosexuals. To the public,
this seemed to confirm McCarthy’s charges.
In the popular imagination, communists and homosexuals
were soon conflated. Both seemed to comprise hidden subcultures with their own
meeting places, cultural codes, and bonds of loyalty. In the 1950s, fear of
political and sexual deviance became so intertwined that it is impossible to
understand the Red Scare without also examining the concurrent Lavender Scare.
Raj Ayyar: Republican rumor-mongers chased down
the son of Senator Lester Hunt, a Democrat from Wyoming. Could you tell
GayToday’s readers what happened to Senator Hunt in 1954?
David K. Johnson: This was one of the most
notorious examples of Republicans using the issue of homosexuality as a
partisan political weapon. In 1954, Senator Lester Hunt was up for
re-election. At that time, the Republicans held control of the Senate only by
the narrowest of margins and were desperate for an additional seat. The head
of the Republican Campaign Committee learned that Hunt’s son, Lester Hunt,
Jr., had been arrested on a morals charge in Lafayette Park—then a
well-known gay male cruising site. He used this information to pressure the
Senator to withdraw from the race. When Hunt refused to succumb to this kind
of blackmail, his son was forced to stand trial. Embarrassed by the resulting
publicity, Senator Hunt became increasingly despondent and reclusive. He
eventually withdrew from the race and ten days later shot himself with a .22
caliber shotgun in his Senate office. This story became the inspiration for
Allen Drury’s best-selling novel, Advise and Consent.
Raj Ayyar: I’d say that The Lavender Scare has
great current significance as a work of history because it exposes the
anti-gay fear-mongering that Republicans initiated during the Cold War Era. It
appears, especially as you show Cold War Era Republicans discovered, that
voters in rural America were much more alarmed by the presence of homosexuals
in the government than of communists. Your history seems to point to today, at
how U.S. Senate Majority Leader Frist as well as Senators Allard (R-Colorado),
Brownsback (R-Kansas) and Sessions (R.-Alabama) are all now-50 years
later-planning to try to use homosexuality as a wedge issue in the upcoming
presidential campaign. Like the Republican demagogues in your history book,
they’re hoping to divert voters from thinking about more important matters,
this time by introducing an anti-gay amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Do
you agree?
David K. Johnson: Certainly there is a long
history of Republicans questioning the morality and sexuality of Democratic
candidates and administrations. In the 1952 presidential election, Republican
campaign rhetoric portrayed Eisenhower and Nixon as “God-fearing men” who
were “for morality.” They promised to clean up the mess in Washington,
including the immorality in the State Department. Their Democratic opponent,
Adlai Stevenson, was portrayed as an intellectual egghead with a “fruity”
voice. The rumors that Stevenson was a homosexual were so widespread that the
tabloid magazine Confidential ran a cover story about “How that Stevenson
rumor started.” Because of the innuendo that permeated the campaign, some
gay men at the time considered Stevenson the first gay presidential candidate.
Raj Ayyar: You’ve discredited certain
widely-believed rumors about FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, especially that he
was seen dressed in drag by a mob moll. Could you say a few words about Hoover
and about those rumors that swirled around him?
David K. Johnson: As I travel around the country
researching and now promoting this book, the most common question I get asked
is “So what about J. Edgar Hoover?” since it was Hoover’s FBI that did
most of the security investigations of government officials. It’s amazing
how the claim of Anthony Summer’s book Official and Confidential-that Hoover
was not only gay but wore a black negligee at Plaza Hotel orgies-has become
part of American popular culture. We will probably never know how Hoover
self-identified sexually, but certainly the claims that Summer makes are
preposterous. The woman who claims to have seen Hoover at the Plaza hotel was
paid for her story and went to jail for perjury in another matter. The only
reason that these rumors seem plausible is that we have forgotten the
vehemence of the Lavender Scare-how obsessed 1950s Washington was with the
threat homosexuals allegedly posed to national security. Even someone as
powerful as Hoover could not have kept his job if he had been as blatant as
writers like Summer claim.
Raj Ayyar: Your book indicates that the Truman
Administration was not particularly eager to go chasing after homosexuals in
government and that the Republicans had hoped to use “homosexual security
risk” threats to discredit Truman and his State Department. In fact,
although the Republicans insisted that that homosexuals were subject to
blackmail, not one such case -in which a gay man or a lesbian gave away
secrets to our enemies-has ever been documented. Isn’t that so?
David K. Johnson: That’s right. Though a
congressional committee spent several months in 1950 studying the threat
homosexuals allegedly posed to national security, they could not find a single
example of a gay or lesbian civil servant who was blackmailed into revealing
state secrets-not one. Subsequent studies have confirmed this. But the myth of
the homosexual as vulnerable to blackmail and therefore a security risk
endured for decades.
In 1960 two employees of the super-secret National
Security Agency defected to the Soviet Union for political reasons. Yet
because Martin and Mitchell were two single men, and one of them had revealed
aberrant sexual behavior in his youth (including experimentation with a
chicken), they were dubbed a “homosexual love team” that had been
blackmailed into defecting. It is a testament to the power of myth over
empirical reality.
Raj Ayyar: Since communists were nigh-impossible
to find in U.S. government service, the term “security risk” was used by
persecutors to go on their witch hunts. What types of people-other than
homosexuals, were considered such risks?
David K. Johnson: A “security risk” was
someone who was considered likely to reveal state secrets, either through
carelessness or coercion. Alcoholics and blabbermouths were therefore
considered prime examples of security risks. Someone who had relatives behind
the “Iron Curtain” was also considered vulnerable to blackmail. But none
of these other categories elicited the kind of special concern-congressional
hearings, security briefing books, specialized security personnel-as did
homosexuals. So although the term “security risk” encompassed a variety of
behaviors, it often functioned as a code for “homosexual.”
Raj Ayyar: The federal government’s purges went
beyond the Washington, D.C. border and extended, even, to the United Nations.
Why was this and what happened?
David K. Johnson: Security officials were
concerned that many gay men and lesbians who were fired from the State
Department were finding employment in the United Nations and other
international organizations. They were afraid that McCarthy and his allies
might expose this situation and so put extreme pressure on these organizations
to copy the anti-gay employment policies of the U.S. government. They also
pressured America’s NATO allies to exclude homosexuals from sensitive
positions within their governments.
Raj Ayyar: How long did persecution—The Lavender
Scare—last after the ignominious departure of Senator McCarthy from the
political scene?
David K. Johnson: The Lavender Scare long outlived
McCarthy. The system of ferreting out and removing gays and lesbians became
institutionalized within the federal loyalty/security system. It remained
standard government policy until 1975. By then a number fired gay employees
had successfully sued the Civil Service Commission, and these favorable court
decisions forced the government to change its policy.
Raj Ayyar: Among the more interesting points
you’ve documented in The Lavender Scare is how the federal government’s
persecution of gays and lesbians during the Cold War Era sparked the
development of our gay and lesbian civil rights movement. This was true not
only in Los Angeles but a bit later in Washington, D.C. where a tiny group of
persecuted gays organized and developed strategies to fight back. What you
seem to be saying, apparently, is that our movement’s roots are more
correctly found in the gay struggle against the U.S. government’s firings
and mistreatments instead of in the rebellion against corrupt police at the
Stonewall bar, a revolt that happened a decade later.
David K. Johnson: Harry Hay, the founder of the
Mattachine Society in California, knew of the homosexual purges going on in
Washington as early as 1948. He feared that as the Cold War with the Soviet
Union escalated and American society took on a wartime footing, the purges
would spread to the private sector and gays and lesbians would find it
impossible to find employment. It was this sense of an “encroaching American
fascism” that inspired him to found the Mattachine Society in 1950-1951.
Working in a defense industry plant in Los Angeles, Hay understood the power
of the federal government in setting employment policies.
But no community experienced the discriminatory policies
of the federal government quite as acutely as Washington, D.C. In the 1950s,
the gay and lesbian community there was a community under siege. Government
workers who lost their jobs usually had to leave town in order to find
employment elsewhere. So it’s no accident that Washington, D.C. became the
center for a new militancy in the gay movement by the early 1960s. It was
there, as gay men and lesbians began to organize and challenge the federal
government’s discriminatory policies, that they developed much of the
rhetoric and tactics of the gay rights movement. By the time the Stonewall
Riots occurred in June 1969, gay men had already successfully challenged the
government’s anti-gay policies in the courts and won several significant
legal victories.
Raj Ayyar: Since your history credits Dr. Franklin
Kameny and the Mattachine Society of Washington for initiating a long but
successful struggle against government persecution, what are some of the ways
in which the Society’s strategies were to became seminal steps leading to
our movement’s many successes?
David K. Johnson: Kameny was one of the first
people to use the language of civil rights when referring to the problems
confronting gays and lesbians. He saw the treatment of gays and lesbians as
analogous to that of racial and religious minorities-a notion we now take for
granted but which was quite novel in the 1950s and 1960s. He was also one of
the first gay men to “come out” publicly. Most early members of the
homophile movement met in private and used pseudonyms in their publications.
Kameny made public appearances on behalf of gays and lesbians using his own
name. Having already lost his government job, he had little left to lose.
Perhaps the two most important tactics the Mattachine
Society of Washington initiated were the use of public demonstrations and
court suits. Public demonstrations like the 1965 picket in front of the White
House were an effective way of garnering publicity for their cause. And legal
challenges ultimately proved the most effective means of dismantling the
government’s anti-gay policies. Courageous men like Bruce Scott and Clifford
Norton challenged their dismissals and won-suggesting that the courts were the
best means of protecting the civil liberties of gay men and lesbians.
Raj Ayyar: In the early 1960s, you tell how a
conservative Texas Democrat, Congressman John Dowdy, attempted to put a stop
to any fund raising by the Mattachine Society of Washington, an effort which
led to a controversial Congressional hearing. This shows, I suppose, that
there’ve been dowdy Democrats who’ve served as big pimples on the derriere
of progress. Nevertheless, I’ve always felt that these little-known hearings
provoked a drama comparable to the 1925 trial about evolution in Tennessee, a
trial whereon was based the twice-produced film, Inherit the Wind. Do you
think too that Dowdy’s Congressional hearing is also such a drama waiting to
become a film?
David K. Johnson: That is an interesting analogy.
Though the Scopes trial in the 1920s received much more publicity than the
Dowdy hearing did in the 1960s, they both illustrate monumental ideological
clashes between traditional and “modern” ways of approaching the world.
Dowdy expressed the traditional notion that homosexuality was immoral,
criminal, and possibly treasonous-a threat to the nation’s survival. Kameny
deployed a new civil rights rhetoric. Kameny saw homosexuals as an oppressed
minority group deserving full citizenship rights. Though this clash of ideas
is unfortunately still with us, the Dowdy hearings were one of first public
forums in which it played out.
Kameny’s whole life would make a good dramatic film. He
comes in at the end of the story I tell leading the cavalry in a frontal
assault on prejudice and homophobia. So yes, shall we start thinking about
casting for the film? How about Anthony Hopkins playing the evil congressman
Dowdy?
Raj Ayyar: You’ve written a stellar work, one of
the most important published gay histories there is and we at GayToday want to
thank you heartily for agreeing to talk with us about it.
David K. Johnson: Thank you very much. And thanks
to Gay Today for being such a big supporter and promoter of glbt history.
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