ALFRED KINSEY AND THE LAVENDER SCARE
By the time Indiana University Professor Dr. Alfred Kinsey published his groundbreaking study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, American society was already on edge. Since the end of World War II, the country had been gripped by a climate of fear, tension, and staunch social conservatism as a result of the new “Cold War” with the Soviet Union.
It was for these reasons and more that when Kinsey estimated in his study that approximately 10 percent of the adult male population of the United States was “more or less exclusively homosexual,” Sexual Behavior in the Human Male became a nationwide bestseller, a phenomenon almost unheard of for a scientific publication. The notion that such a substantial percentage of American men could potentially be homosexual aroused people’s curiosity — as well as their fears.
Watch the bonus clip on Dr. Alfred Kinsey.
On February 9, 1950, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin stoked those fears by claiming to have a list of 205 members of the Communist Party who were working in the State Department; no such list ever existed. His comments touched off the second “Red Scare,” a prolonged period of fear and paranoia regarding “communist infiltration” into the U.S. federal workforce and the military.
Less than three weeks after McCarthy’s statement, on February 28, Assistant Secretary of State John Peurifoy testified to the Senate Appropriations Committee that the State Department had discharged 91 employees as “security risks,” not on the grounds that they were members of the Communist Party, but that they were homosexuals.
Peurifoy’s disclosure set off an entirely separate and parallel panic, this time over homosexuals in the federal workforce and military, known commonly as the “Lavender Scare.” The most prevalent fear was that homosexuals in the federal workforce — particularly those working in the State Department’s Foreign Service Office — were uniquely susceptible to blackmail by Soviet and other foreign intelligence agencies, due to extremely harsh legal penalties and social ostracism that would accompany public exposure of their sexuality.
Within weeks of Peurifoy’s announcement, the Senate authorized a formal investigation into the “problem” of homosexuals in the federal government. The subcommittee charged with the investigation, known as the “Hoey Committee” after its chairman, Democratic Senator Clyde Hoey of North Carolina, was officially instructed to:
“...determine the extent of the employment of homosexuals and other sex perverts in Government; to consider reasons why their employment by the Government is undesirable; and to examine into the efficacy of the methods used in dealing with the problem.”
Following a six-month-long probe, during which investigators interviewed military and intelligence leaders as well as prominent psychiatrists, the Hoey Committee produced a final report in December 1950, which concluded that homosexuals were “unsuitable for employment in the Federal Government.” The report recommended that homosexuals be automatically excluded from the federal workforce.
At the same time, the APA was drafting its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a standardized handbook of mental disorders for use by psychiatrists. In 1952, the first edition of the DSM was published, with homosexuality classified as a “sociopathic personality disturbance.”
On April 27, 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower implemented the Hoey Committee’s recommendations by issuing Executive Order 10450, which stated that applicants for federal employment could not be considered, and federal employees must be dismissed, if an investigation into their background revealed any of the following:
(i) Any behavior, activities, or associations which tend to show that the individual is not reliable or trustworthy.
(ii) Any deliberate misrepresentations, falsifications, or omissions of material facts.
(iii) Any criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct, habitual use of intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, sexual perversion.
(iv) Any illness, including any mental condition, of a nature which in the opinion of competent medical authority may cause significant defect in the judgment or reliability of the employee, with due regard to the transient or continuing effect of the illness and the medical findings in such case.
(v) Any facts which furnish reason to believe that the individual may be subjected to coercion, influence, or pressure which may cause him to act contrary to the best interests of the national security.
The impact of Executive Order 10450 was immediate. In the two decades after it was adopted, thousands of homosexuals were fired from their jobs working for the federal government. Federal employees suspected of being homosexual were routinely subjected to blackmail, polygraph tests, intimidation, and surveillance by the FBI — and to the ever-present fear of being caught and losing their jobs.
QUESTIONS
- What cultural assumptions about homosexuality did Dr. Alfred Kinsey challenge with his 1948 study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male?
- What was the primary assumption about homosexuality that led President Eisenhower to issue Executive Order 10450?
- How was the public reaction to Dr. Kinsey’s report an example of “unintended consequences”?