The Lavender Scare emerged in the early 1950s alongside the Red Scare. But while Red Scare proponents like Senator Joseph McCarthy and others linked homosexuality to communism, the campaign against LGBTQ Americans operated on distinct ideological grounds. A 1950 State Department memo, titled “Problem of Homosexuals and Sex Perverts in the Department of State,” linked tolerance of “homosexuality with the accompanying decline of the Egyptian, Greek and Roman Empires” and argued that the United States, as the modern global power, had to purge gay and lesbian individuals to survive the Cold War. The State Department took heed of such harmful, and ahistorical, rhetoric.
That same year, Deputy Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy testified before a Senate subcommittee that while no communists were employed at the State Department, the department had ousted various individuals considered security risks, including 91 people the department deemed homosexuals. Rather than calming fears, Peurifoy’s testimony intensified public anxiety.
White House Cabinet meetings followed up on the supposed security threats of homosexuality. Newspapers ran stories highlighting the imagined security risks posed by gay and lesbian government workers. Politicians brought the issue to House and Senate floors and committees. On the House floor, Rep. Arthur L. Miller, a Republican from Nebraska warned that while there were 91 of them dismissed in the State Department, there were “several thousand" more LGBTQ workers employed by the Federal Government. “I sometimes wonder how many of these homosexuals have….been in sensitive positions and subject to blackmail,” he asked, asserting that "the Russians are strong believers in homosexuality, and that those same people are able to get into the State Department and get somebody in their embrace.” Miller argued that Russian agents could seduce gay and lesbian federal workers in order to blackmail them, exploiting their fear of being outed to force them to betray the United States. “These people are dangerous. They will go to any limit," summarized Miller. "They are not to be trusted and when blackmail threatens they are a dangerous group.”
Officials across the government and journalists repeated the suggestion that Soviet agents could threaten to out, or blackmail, gay and lesbian government workers if they refused to collaborate. Yet, no evidence ever surfaced that any gay or lesbian government worker had betrayed the U.S. under duress.
Nonetheless, in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, declaring “sexual perversion,” a euphemism for homosexuality, a national security risk. The order authorized invasive investigations, surveillance, and dismissals across federal agencies and the military. By the end of the decade, an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 individuals accused of being homosexual had been fired or forced to resign, often ruining the lives of dedicated civil servants.