Seventy years ago, at the height of the McCarthy era—when federal employees with left-wing views were routinely interrogated and fired for being suspected communists—a related purge of queer workers was underway. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order listing “sexual perversion” as a basis for terminating federal civil service employees, on the theory that gay men and lesbians were susceptible to blackmail by the country’s enemies. In what became known as the Lavender Scare, at least 5,000 federal workers were fired for suspected homosexuality over the next two decades.
“More people were targeted during that period for being gay or for engaging in same-sex intimacy than were targeted for being communist,” says San Francisco State University professor Marc Stein. The firings rippled out to state and local governments and the private sector, he adds, “accompanied by notions that the gay people were weak, were divisive in workplaces, were not strong representatives of a moral United States.” It’s taken decades since then for LGBTQ people to gain acceptance in public life, including in the federal workforce. Not until the Obama administration was Eisenhower’s executive order formally rescinded.
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Now, the very programs and support groups that have helped queer folks integrate could create risks for their participants. Employee resource groups like Michael’s have been shutting down operations and wiping their websites, afraid of putting their members at risk in the openly hostile Trump administration.
“We’ve gone dark,” a former LGBTQ resource group leader in the Department of Agriculture tells Mother Jones. “We have pulled our contact lists off of government systems. Personally, as someone who has been very involved in queer spaces, I went through and deleted a bunch of emails and contacts, because I have lists of queer employees, and I am afraid if someone in the Trump administration gets their hands on it.”
“I’m scared for the people I’ve been trying to help,” says a trans worker for the Interior Department who is involved in employee resource groups. “People came to us because they needed community, needed connection. We were trying to keep each other safe. Now, we’re all just this big target.”