Sunday, November 27, 2022

Forgotten History: The Hoey Report and the Beginning of the Lavender Scare


November 27, 1950, in history, is a bit of an insignificant date so a senate report that isn’t very famous released on this date doesn’t really carry an impact, except this report to a large degree led to the historic “Lavender Scare” of the 1950s when gay men and women were forced from public service in government and military or from any business doing government work. Homosexuals and lesbians being forcible outed is now considered immoral, but then it was often considered an important part of U.S. National Security.

Officially titled “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government”, but better known as the Hoey Report, after Senator Clyde Hoey, who chaired the senate committee declared that homosexuals “are not proper persons to be employed in government.” (The derogatory term “perverts” was freely and publicly used in these years.)

The report determined that the quality and characteristic of being a homosexual were so extreme and unacceptable that one naturally kept it secret and would go to great lengths to protect their privacy, and this made them easy targets for blackmail. Despite its alarmist homophobic conclusion, the report was unable to cite a single example of a homosexual government employee being blackmailed into divulging sensitive national security information.

Regardless the report was so accepted across government, of course, building on preconceived prejudices that it led to President Eisenhower issuing Executive Order 10450, revising President Truman’s federal loyalty program and adding the categories of “immoral” behavior and “sexual perversion” as grounds for dismissing a federal employee as a “security risk”.



Sources:

shorturl.at/dqRTX

https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2016/summer/lavender.html

https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/executive-order/10450.html





 

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