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Un-American Articles
The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.
I
The issue of "un-Americanism" was present at the creation of the gay rights movement. Indeed, the movement emerged, at least in part, as a response to wide-ranging discriminatory policies and practices that were implemented by the federal government supposedly to bolster the nation's internal security during the Cold War. Faced with claims that they constituted an existential threat to the United States, activists in the early gay rights movement worked hard to affirm their patriotism, and they appealed frequently to the nation's founding ideals of liberty and equality. One occasion, they even characterized those who discriminated against them as "un-American." Fifty years later, the rhetoric of "Americanism" and the "un-American" has been centre stage in the gay rights movement's battle to secure marriage rights and repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Accusing opponents of gay rights of engaging in un-American behaviour is, at one level, a corollary to the appeal to Americanism that has long been central to the movement's rhetorical and symbolic approach. But the increased willingness of gay rights activists to level this charge appears to be symptomatic of the divisiveness of the nation's contemporary political culture following three decades of the "culture wars." Moreover, activists' use of patriotic forms of protest raises interesting and at times troubling questions about the relationship between the gay rights movement and American nationalism.
II
In recent years a number of historians have argued convincingly that, during the early Cold War, homophobia was an integral part of the anticommunist crusade at home. In February 1950, following Undersecretary of State John Purifoy's revelation that his department had recently fired a large number of homosexuals, fears about the security risks posed by so-called "sexual perverts" spread quickly. Before long, Republicans in Congress were using the issue to attack the Truman administration. Senator William E. Jenner, a Republican from Indiana, denounced the "New Deal, Fair Deal and fairy deal administrations."1Viewed as emotionally unstable, of weak moral fibre, and vulnerable to blackmail, homosexuals were cast as a serious threat to the moral health and security of the United States by...