Lavender Scare Purged Gay Workers

The Lavender Scare was a mid-20th-century moral panic about homosexual people in the United States government, and it led to their mass dismissal from federal service. Officials claimed gay and lesbian employees posed security risks because foreign agents could supposedly blackmail them. The purge ran alongside McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare, with anti-communist fear and anti-gay suspicion reinforcing each other. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450 helped formalize the removals by treating “sexual perversion” as grounds for firing federal workers.

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