Mar 12, 2004  |  By: KEVIN RIORDAN  | COMMENTS     

THE HOARY RHETORIC about the supposedly treasonous/treacherous nature of homosexuality that the historian David K. Johnson documents in his fine new book can initially strike a reader as amusing. The homophobic fulmination of various McCarthy-era senators and representatives he quotes are fatuous, if not ludicrous.

But as “The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government” goes on to reveal, the jaw-dropping extent of the federal government’s persecution of its gay and lesbian employees in the ’50s and ’60s turns amusement into rage.

Thousands of the “perverts” about whom so many mid-20th century politicians pontificated suffered egregious harm at the hands of a nation they sought to serve.

“The book has become more relevant since I finished it, and in a way I hadn’t expected,” Johnson said recently from Tampa, where he is a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of South Florida. “National security is now being used to justify all sorts of activities. And it’s clear the Republican Party has a long history of using gay people as a wedge issue.”

A New Hampshire native and former D.C. resident who dedicates his book to his partner, Willard Dumas, Johnson said “The Lavender Scare” began as a research project about early gay activism in D.C. A visit to the attic in the Washington home of the pioneering gay civil rights activist Frank Kameny convinced the author he was on to something bigger.

Kameny, who lost his job as an astronomer during the federal purge, has amassed an archive about the persecution, as well as its impact on what became a national movement for gay liberation.

Johnson decided to make the “lavender scare” the subject of his doctoral dissertation at Northwestern University, and ultimately, a book. What engaged him was the largely unexplored connection between the history of sexual politics and national security politics.

“It’s kind of amazing how the myth that gay people were a threat to national security becomes part of the accepted truth,” he said, noting the utter absence of evidence that gay people were inherently vulnerable to the blandishments of the fiendish agents of Communism.

THE PURGES damaged thousands of lives, and some people committed suicide. Still, the effort to rid the federal bureaucracy of gay men and lesbians continued in some form until the early 1970s.

“The Lavender Scare” is not averse to pooh-poohing a couple of other old chestnuts, including the conventional gay wisdom that the homo-baiting J. Edgar Hoover enjoyed donning dresses (the single on-the-record eyewitness to Hoover’s supposed drag exploits is considerably less than credible).

Johnson also makes a persuasive case that Washington’s lively lesbian and gay community of the ’40s and ’50s was far more representative of metropolitan homosexual life than the desperate isolation and furtive goings-on of legend.

“One of the points of the book is that, while there was this horrible period of oppression [in the ’50s], it was a reaction to a period of freedom,” Johnson said.

“The Lavender Scare” points out other, more uplifting, ironies. The federal witch hunters may have been aided by gay Washington’s close-knit nature, but the latter also contributed to the rise of a gay movement that helped spark the abolition of the anti-gay apparatus itself.

“Conservatives forced gay people out of the closet with the purges,” Johnson said. “It certainly wasn’t their intent, but the unintended consequence was to make enough gay people angry enough [to start a movement.]”

As quaint as some of the beliefs about “mentally defective” gay men and “mannish” lesbians may seem, it’s worth noting that security clearances remained an issue for gay people in some job categories for years. And the scars have endured; finding people who had been forced from their jobs and were willing to talk about it on the record was more difficult than the author had imagined.

“I remember one moment when I was doing research in the National Archives, and I came upon a list of people in the U.S. Information Agency who were being investigated,” Johnson said. “It was 10 pages long, and a huge percentage were gay cases. Just name after name after name with the notation ‘confessed’ or ‘resigned.’”