1 Universitt Potsdam SoSe 2011 Kurs: Queer America: GLBT Life in the USA Dozent: Matthew Henry Student:

Birk Budweis Assignment 2: On The So-Called "Lavender Scare"

In my opinion the question where the origins of the common belief that homosexuals are "a threat to the nation's security" lie, is one whose implications reach rather far into USAmerican history. That is, they reach back to the time "when Europeans began arriving at the shores of the Americas" (Eaklor, 14) and would impose their cultural values on the Natives as well as on people of African origin, based on "the assumption of superiority [of their culture] on the part of the Europeans", which also included assumptions about the superiority of the European conceptions of women's and men's proper roles and behaviors (Eaklor, 14). Additionally, there were the European concepts of religion, politics, and economics and, especially important, the lack of separation among those arenas (Eaklor, 15). Since the religious concepts define heresy, and since heresy includes the willingness to engage in sex acts prohibited by orthodox religion (Eaklor, 16), homosexuals would also be persecuted then along with people who simply didn't fit in with the gender norms. As Eaklor implies, the dynamics of sex and gender in this era would have effects far beyond the 16th and 17th centuries (Eaklor, 15). And this may indeed be a factor that contributed to the Lavender Scare. It may not have been that people were literally burnt to death for being different. However, they were dismissed from their jobs and their reputations were ruined in events that, according to Vicki Eaklor, have also been called witch hunt[s](88). Especially the fact that this terminology is used for the persecution of alleged homosexuals points out the similarities between the 16th century witch-hunts and what we might call their

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20th century counterpart in the USA. It may, in my opinion, be seen as history repeating itself, since people are being persecuted because of being an alleged danger to the state (that is, state and the church in the past) in both cases. Even Vicki Eaklor states that these deeply rooted ideas may help to explain some of the later attitudes and treatment of GLBT people (16) and the Lavender Scare might just be one of these later treatments proving Eaklor's theory.

Another at least equally, if not more, important factor for the stigmatization of GLBT people was what Eaklor calls the Medical Model in combination with the second Red Scare which took place at roughly the same time as the Lavender Scare. From the beginning of sexology, there had been scientists who thought of the homosexual as a type of person who required treatment (Eaklor, 35) which led to the perception of queers as mentally and morally unstable (Eaklor, 88). Since there was a strong fear in certain parts of US-American society that Reds were infiltrating the government (Eaklor, 86) during the second Red Scare, people that were considered sexual deviants and therefore more or less mentally ill, would inevitably seem as those most susceptible to whatever the communists were deemed to try and manipulate them with "in subtle ways" (Eaklor, 86). It is obvious that a person perceived like as was described above, could not have a position of great responsibility, applying the public opinion of the post-war anti-communist USA. Therefore, people who were potentially homosexual (that is, of questionable moral strength) had to be dismissed from any working position within the official institutions and especially from the government.

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The conclusion may be drawn that neither of the factors, the Red Scare and the Medical Model, would have led to a Lavender Scare on its own, but that it rather was the combination of these two thing that made the Scare and its consequences possible (or necessary, according to some) to expel homosexuals from all government services and that homosexuality could also not be displayed in an approving/positive or even neutral way in cinemas or on television (cf. Eaklor, 89)

One more closely connected factor to be considered is that procreatively-defined heterosex was one expression of a postwar ideology of fecundity (Katz, 156), since in the postwar era the traditional gender roles were more or less re-established, which meant that anybody who would not act according to these very norms was not part of what Katz calls a cult of domesticity (156). Keeping in mind that homosexuals do not submit to this doctrine of procreation and in some cases also might question gender norms, they were not only to be seen as morally and pathologically unstable people, but they also opposed the ideology of mainstream culture at the time.

If the combination of these factors along with others I did not mention here is viewed as a whole of things shedding a rather negative light on non-heterosexual people, it might be said that the consequences of the Lavender scare can be seen as a quite logical thing. This, on the other hand, does not mean that the reasons (that were ground for perceiving homosexuals as they were perceived back then) are logical, or even clear.