GLR July-August 2025

employment in the Foreign Service. But by then, the moral panic about homosexuals in government had resulted in an es timated 5,000 to 10,000 resignations or firings and unrecorded thousands of well-qualified men and women who avoided ap plying for jobs in government because of their sexual orienta tion. In some instances, the negative consequences were even more profound: an unknown number of those who were under investigation or fired on allegations of homosexuality died by suicide. While the suffering caused by the Lavender Scare is unde niable, its legacy is not entirely negative. Johnson is among those historians who point out that the oppression of these anti gay purges eventually galvanized gay men and women to fight back. Frank Kameny’s transformation from Harvard-trained as tronomer to gay rights activist was catalyzed by his 1957 firing from the Army Map Service in the U.S. Department of Defense on suspicion of homosexuality. Although his subsequent appeal to the Civil Service Commission was unsuccessful, it was the first known civil rights claim based on sexual orientation pur sued in a U.S. court. Will the current moral panic over gender identity and trans gender rights follow a trajectory similar to that of the Lavender Scare? Will government continue to discriminate against people whose gender identities do not match the sex recorded on their birth certificates? Or will our legislators and leaders come to understand that variations in sexual and gender identity are sim ply expressions of the diversity of humankind? I believe that ignorance was at the heart of McCarthyism. While many elected officials used the Red Scare and the Laven der Scare to promote a political agenda, a better-informed pop ulace would not have fallen prey to the moral panic that identified homosexuality as a threat commensurate with Com munism. When leaders, legislators, and the public at large come to understand that diverse sexual and gender identities are not a threat to society but instead a manifestation of humanity’s daz zling complexity, they will stop supporting efforts to persecute and negate these individuals. R EFERENCES Adkins, Judith. “These People are Frightened to Death.” Congressional Inves tigations and the Lavender Scare. In Prologue, vol 48, no. 2 (Summer 2016). Johnson, David K . The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government . University of Chicago Press, 2004. July–August 2025 Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn at the Army-McCarthy hearings, 1954.

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