A New Lavender Scare
History provides the roadmap anti-LGBTQ+ forces are using to persecute and discriminate against Americans.
While newsreels from the period capture members of Congress asking the famous question, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” another question was posed at least as frequently, if more discreetly: “Information has come to the attention of the Civil Service Commission that you are a homosexual. What comment do you care to make?”
—David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government
As directed by the Secretary of Defense in his February 7, 2025, memorandum, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” it is Department policy that, pursuant to Executive Order 14183, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals who have a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria are incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service.
—Secretary of Defense Pete Hesgeth, February 26, 2025 Memo
Recently I participated in a panel discussion about Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951). The film is partly based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1950 novel of the same name, though Hitchcock evidently told his primary screenwriter Czenzi Ormonde1 to ignore the book. It’s a fascinating example of an adaptation that departs from the tone and many of the major plot elements of the original, while keeping some of its most interesting themes and preoccupations2.
Much recent analysis of both Hitchcock’s film and Highsmith’s book have focused on the no-so-subtle queer coding of the relationship between protagonist Guy and Bruno, the man whose proposal to “trade murders” drives both versions of the story.
Indeed, it’s easy to argue that both Highsmith and Hitchcock fully intended for such a reading to hover just below the surface of their stories.
Highsmith would go to create gay-coded characters like Tom Ripley, and to write one of the first major lesbian novels (The Price of Salt, or Carol) to feature a more-or-less happy ending for the lovers.
And Hitchcock had already adapted at least one story featuring explicitly gay characters in his film Rope (1948), featuring Strangers on a Train’s Guy, Farley Granger (who was, himself, a more-or-less openly bisexual man).
And both stories derive much of their power and subtext from the historical background of what would come to be known as the “Lavender Scare,” which involved the persecution of federal employees from 1940s to 1960s (and arguably through the 1980s)3, and which would drive a larger cultural panic about “sex perverts”4 in America that intensified the persecution of LGBTQ+ people throughout that era.
Queer Coding in Strangers on a Train
Highsmith’s version of Guy is engages in a heterosexual romance throughout the book (albeit, notably and scandalously, with a woman who is not his wife), but there are also early indicators about a more complex sexuality. In the opening pages of the novel, Guy’s outfit is described very specifically: “He wore flannel trousers that needed pressing, a dark jacket that slacked over his slight body and showed faintly purple where the light struck it, and a tomato tie, carelessly knotted” (1-2).
By the 1930s, the color lavender had become (often negatively) associated with gay culture.
Shortly thereafter, Highsmith introduces Bruno with descriptive words like “degenerately”— to describe his jaw— and part of his face is described as having “skin… as smooth as a girl’s” (3).
It’s easy to read descriptions like these as coded indicators that Guy and Bruno, at the very least, do not (or cannot) fit into the expected straight and/ or masculine roles of 1950s America. And the background of the Lavender Scare puts the very real danger of deviating from these roles into sharp relief. (In an episode of the Horror Queers podcast, the hosts point out that the film version suggests one motivation Bruno may have for wanting his father killed is that his father is threatening to have him institutionalized— perhaps for his unstable behavior, but also, plausibly, because he may suspect Bruno is gay.)
The book contains many implications of some kind of same-sex romantic or sexual attraction between Guy and Bruno. At times, Guy is repulsed by Bruno; at others, particularly as his identity becomes more and more wrapped up in his reactions to Bruno, he becomes at times sympathetic, even protective.
For example, towards the end of the book, Highsmith writes, from Guy’s perspective, “And Bruno, he and Bruno. Each was what the other had not chosen to be, the cast-off self, what he thought he hated but perhaps in reality loved” (172). This suggests not only Guy’s complex personal feelings for his antagonist and co-conspirator, but perhaps also a kind of envy that Bruno, for all of his violence and criminal impulses, lives a comparatively freer and more open life than the respectability-seeking Guy.
Critical analyses of queer themes in Hitchcock range broadly, from readings that argue Hitchcock’s films are homophobic to alternative readings that read them as empathetic for queer-coded characters and even critical of homophobia.
And in Highsmith’s novels Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley, gay-coded male characters do explore the darker side of human nature by contemplating or committing murders, but there are also queer-coded characters who seem to be more self-accepting and who are not violent.
In Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt (the basis for the 2015 Todd Haynes film Carol), which she published under a pseudonym in 1952, there is an extremely rare-for-the-time positive depiction of a love affair between two women. The novel notably does not end with the same-sex lovers being punished by the law or by fate (as the gay-coded characters in Train and are).
The Lavender Scare
According to historian David K. Johnson’s book The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government, in February 1950— the year Highsmith published her book— Senator Joseph McCarthy “made the inflammatory claim that 205 card-carrying Communists were working for the State Department”.
In response, that same month, “Deputy Undersecretary John Peurifoy denied that the department employed any actual Communists. At the same time, however, he revealed that a number of persons considered to be security risks had been forced out, and that among these were ninety-one homosexuals”.
These intertwined paranoias about “Communists” and “homosexuals” ultimately fueled a witch hunt resulting in the firing of thousands of federal employees.
According to Johnson, many more government employees who were gay, or accused of being gay, than employees who were accused of being “Communists,” were fired for being “security risks”. Indeed “security risk” became almost interchangeable in the public consciousness with terms like “sex pervert”. (While McCarthy did make some comments about “Communist and queers,” he was not the architect of the Lavender Scare— perhaps because, as an unmarried man, he was worried about caught up in the purge himself).
Senator Styles Bridges, according to Johnson, was primarily responsible for the ensuing effort at “uncovering homosexuals in the State Department”.
Bridges had publicly rebuked McCarthy’s “wild” claims about large numbers of Communists in the Department, but wanted the hunt for those imaginary Communists to be redirected toward what he viewed as actual “security risks”: namely, “drunkard[s],” “criminal[s],” or “homosexuals”.
In 1953, President Eisenhower signed a law that explicitly barred gay people from working for the federal government or private contractors working for the government. The first state to decriminalize same-sex relationships, Illinois, didn’t do so until 1963.
The New Lavender Scare
Mark Twain is purported to have coined the observation, “History doesn’t repeat, but if often rhymes”. The rhymes of the Lavender Scare era are loud and clear today.
Almost exactly 75 years after Peurifoy signaled a purge of LGBTQ+ people from government service, Secretary of War Pete Hesgeth sent a memo purging transgender people from military service.
Hesgeth also recently vowed before a meeting of US military generals to purge the military of problems created by what he repeatedly called the “woke department”. He vowed there would be, “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship, no more division, distraction or gender delusions.”
In March, his department, then called the Department of Defense, announced a purge of transgender service member and recruits with gender dysphoria
President Trump, during the same meeting with the generals, railed against “radical left lunatics”. The federal government under Trump and the military under Hesgeth have also purged LGBTQ+ service members and cracked down on LGBTQ+ representation in public spaces.
Over 200 people have been arrested at the public restrooms in Penn Station, a popular gay meetup spot, since June. At least 20 of the men arrested have reportedly been turned over to ICE. Prior to the recent surge (perhaps driven by the fact that federal agents have more authority to make arrests in Penn Station than in New York City proper), there were only about 12 arrests made for “public lewdness” in the area this year.
This clearly echoes the focus on rounding up men in gay “cruising” spots during the first Lavender Scare, and the way transphobia and homophobia have both provided cover for and driven a broader attack on political opponents. Rightwing candidates have openly used anti-LGBTQ+ slogans, such as saying their opponents are “for they/ them, not for us” in recent campaigns and during the last presidential election. Groups like Moms for Liberty, the Freedom Caucus Network, and Alliance Defending Freedom have pushed anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric closer and closer to the mainstream of American politics.
(For what it’s worth, at least some of these campaigns are not only dangerously transphobic, but also ineffective with voters.)
Writing for The Nation two years ago, high school journalist Ariana Lee explicitly compared the growing school censorship movement targeting LGBTQ+ representation, and the onslaught of “Don’t Say Gay” bills introduced to state legislatures, to the Lavender Scare.
What can we learn?
In the 1950s, mainstream American culture had an extremely different understanding of LGBTQ+ identity, with popular opinion holding that to be gay was a “perversion” at worst or a health issue at best, and that making the choice to seek out same-sex relationships indicated a “twisted” and weak character.
We aren’t living in exactly the same situation, but the paranoia, scapegoating, and tilt towards authoritarian repression in the name of winning a perceived moral or cultural war against “degenerates” does strongly echo the era that produced Stranger on a Train.
Highsmith, who had romantic relationships with many of women throughout her life, was herself often self-critical of her “weakness” in living as a lesbian or bisexual. She even attended conversion therapy (though some critics attribute this more to her desire to meet other queer women than a sincere desire to change her preferences or identity).
She didn’t acknowledge she had written The Price of Salt, her positive depiction of a romance between two women, until 1990.
Hopefully, most of us know better now.
Hopefully, we know that turning against and demonizing others is the first step in a downward spiral into government repression and discrimination that will influence us all.
On the other hand, the people who rushed headlong into the Red Scare and Lavender Scare were only a few years removed from World War II and the Holocaust (an event, it should be said, that Highsmith treated with disturbing approval in some of her correspondence). Many Americans do not seem to have grasped that scapegoating minority groups and handing over power to punish or disappear them led to the rise of both the Nazis and to the worst atrocities under Stalin.
On the other other hand, activist Harry Hay founded the first major national gay rights organization in America two months before the 1950 McCarthy speech that kicked off the Lavender Scare in earnest. And there are many people organizing grassroots campaigns to protect their neighbors from persecution today, just as there were in the 1950s.
As Johnson points out, there was never any evidence that gay men, the primary victims of the Lavender Scare, had collaborated with enemy agents, or been compromised because of their gay identities. The Lavender Scare didn’t do anything to combat the real or perceived threats of then-enemies like the USSR and China (any more than attacking student athletes or people trying to use the bathroom does anything but play into the disinformation strategies of current adversaries such as Russia, which played up transphobic conspiracy theories during the Paris Olympics, during widespread disinformation campaigns using AI that also sought to influence the 2024 presidential election).
Instead, it turned Americans against their fellow citizens in a way that served no one, except possibly the same foreign adversaries the government claimed to be defending against.
To support this work:
Though formally credited to author Raymond Chandler, possibly due to studio pressure, since Chandler had won an Oscar for his script to Double Indemnity (1942), both Hitchcock and Chandler wanted Chandler’s name off the script after they had a falling out. Czenzi Ormonde was tasked with writing a script, based on Hitchcock’s verbal telling of the story, and Hitchcock’s wife likely helped with the final product as well. For what it’s worth, Chandler evidently believed the script should stick closer to the plot of Highsmith’s novel, which involves a radically different ending that drives home her pet theme of the capacity for darkness and violence in a seemingly “normal” person.
Highsmith published Strangers on a Train in 1950; it was her first novel. Hitchcock famously used an intermediary to buy the film rights for $7,500, perhaps knowing that Highsmith might reasonably ask for much more if she knew one of the biggest directors in the world was making the film.
That same year, in her diaries, Highsmith wrote, “Murder is a kind of making love, a kind of possessing”.
It’s hard to discuss either artist without addressing their problematic behavior.
Highsmith was a complex person. She attended conversion therapy, but also wrote that she wasn’t consciously ashamed of being gay. She had apparently loving, long-term romances with at least three Jewish women during her life, but also made viciously anti-Semitic statements in her diary, to friends, and even in publications (through a pseudonym). She also made racist statements about Black people.
Hitchcock was infamously hard on his leading women (most famously The Birds’ Tippi Hedren, who he repeatedly attacked with actual birds (perhaps because she had rejected his sexual or romantic advances). He was a perfectionist who would put actors in danger of personal harm and extreme discomfort to get a shot. (For example, in the carousel scene in Strangers.)
According to a 1995 report from the US General Accounting Office, “Agencies could deny homosexual men and women employment because of their sexual orientation until 1975, when the Civil Service Commission issued guidelines prohibiting the government from denying employment on the basis of sexual orientation”. The report also states that until 1991— perhaps because of vague guidelines— sexual orientation was still considered during the process of granting security clearances. Notably, Secretary Hesgeth has stated that he wants to return to pre-1991 military standards.
Here I’m quoting Johnson’s Lavender Scare. Terms like “sex perverts,” in the context of Lavender Scare era, seem to have almost always referenced men who were, or who officials accused, of being gay.