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The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. By DAVID K. JOHNSON. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. 277. $30.00 (cloth).
On the last day of February 1950 Assistant secretary of State John Peurifoy set off a bombshell while testifying before a Senate investigative committee. Sitting alongside secretary of State Dean Acheson, Peurifoy dramatically announced that the State Department had recently ousted ninety-one "security risks" on the grounds that they were suspected homosexuals. These revelations, coming on the heels of Senator Joseph McCarthy's accusations about subversion in the State Department, in the midst of the emotional debate over who "lost" China, and less than four months before the outbreak of the Korean War, created a sensation. Homosexuality had long been grounds for dismissal from federal employment, and Peurifoy's revelations ignited one of the most determined, if little known, purges in American history.
While historians have dissected the causes and consequences of the Mc-Carthyite Red Scare, less is known about cold war persecution of gays and lesbians. David K. Johnson's The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government tells the story of how during the cold war the federal bureaucracy came to be seen as a haven for sexual "misfits" and "deviants" and how congressional conservatives, with the aid of the federal internal security agencies, charged that homosexuality constituted a powerful cabal that threatened the republic every bit as much as Communism.
Like the Red Scare, the Lavender Scare is a story of paranoia and persecution, of ruined careers and shattered lives. But Johnson's account is also a story of achievement, activism, and social change, as the cold war repression of homosexuals in government inspired the emergence of an organized opposition movement to defend the rights of gays and lesbians. This focus on the confluence of homosexuality and the loyalty question has produced an important contribution to the scholarship on the emergence of a gay and lesbian civil rights movement as well as the scholarship on the cold war, the federal government, and even the New Deal. A visiting professor of history at the University...