Donald Trump’s trans panic could cost lives. Just look at the Lavender Scare.

There may be no more critical election in U.S. history than the one in which Americans will vote on November 5th. Vice President Kamala Harris repeatedly said on the campaign trail that former President Donald Trump posed a threat to democracy and a host of other aspects of Americans’ daily lives. The specter of January 6, 2021 is still alive for most Americans, so this is not an exaggerated statement or mere electioneering.

Additionally, Harris cited the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which is a plan to redesign America’s government. It will also greatly threaten historically marginalized communities, particularly immigrants and LGBTQ+ people.

Related:

While Trump claims to know nothing about Project 2025, members of his previous administration were among its creators and architects. Harris posted it on her website so voters could see what the project would accomplish in 2025, and she referenced it in the Sept. 10 debate.

Never miss a beat

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date on the latest political news and LGBTQ+ insights.

But since the debate, Americans have also seen firsthand the impact rumors and innuendo — a key part of Project 2025 — can have on entire communities after Trump claimed that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were kidnapping and eating pets. This false claim – debunked in real time in the debate by ABC host David Muir and multiple times since then by various Ohio officials, including law enforcement and even the Republican governor – showed the nation how a rapidly spreading rumor affects both sides can impact a community like Springfield, Ohio and take over an entire country.

From McCarthy to Trump

That’s what happened when the Red Scare – the threat of communists infiltrating American society at all levels in the 1940s and 1950s – gave birth to the Lavender Scare: a belief that homosexual men and women were viewed as “sexual perverts,” “deviants.” etc. were considered a national security threat. As Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, have made false accusations against Haitian immigrants, most Republicans in both the House and Senate have supported the rumors. This is similar to when Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy spread rumors about communists in the US government decades ago.

Many of McCarthy’s fellow Republicans at the time – including President Dwight D. Eisenhower – supported McCarthy’s persistent effort to eradicate communists from American society, but it was also a bipartisan effort, with some Democrats also supporting McCarthy. Democrats also actively participated in the gay purges that led to the “Lavender Scare” – in which McCarthy claimed that homosexuals were more vulnerable to Soviet blackmail and therefore posed a national security risk and posed a significant threat to the country’s The Cold War intensified.

In 1947, the U.S. Park Police launched its “Program for the Elimination of Sexual Perversions,” which targeted gay men to arrest and intimidate them. In 1948, Congress passed a law “for the treatment of sexual psychopaths” in the nation’s capital. This law made it easier to arrest and punish people who acted out of same-sex desire and also labeled them as mentally ill.

The subversive aspects of homosexuality and communism were linked. Even the Communist Party had warned about the threat of homosexuality in 1950.

McCarthy’s efforts to eradicate communists, and his focus on homosexuals in particular, brought a significant number of closeted writers, actors, and even politicians to his House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings. Ironically, his main support in his work was his assistant, 26-year-old Roy Cohn, a closeted gay man who would later become Donald Trump’s lawyer.

Executive Order 10450

The direct connection between McCarthy and HUAC and Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450 of April 27, 1953, which resulted in the expulsion of homosexuals from all levels of American government, remains unclear. But there was certainly a connection. The policy was concise and merciless: anyone suspected of being a lesbian or gay man was summarily dismissed from their post, regardless of position. There was no protection for these men and women from being outed either.

The devastating effects of this policy reverberated for years, affecting thousands of gays and lesbians. Executive Order 10450 was not repealed until 1995 and continued to ban gays from the military until the implementation of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” rule, which in turn was not repealed until 2011.

Eisenhower’s own Project 2025

Eisenhower’s acceptance of McCarthy’s actions and McCarthyism itself was downplayed, and yet just two months after this order was issued, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed by the federal government at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, on June 19, 1953. The Rosenbergs were the first American civilians executed for espionage and the first executed in peacetime. Eisenhower did not stop their execution.

Eisenhower is often referred to as the last good Republican president and a serious conservative who put country above party. But Eisenhower’s history shows something very different, and he succumbed to the worst aspects of bigotry and promoted two of the worst policies in modern US history: his Executive Order 10450 and Operation Wetback – even mentioning the latter by name can give you a Twitter timeout take /X for using an ethnic slur.

Executive Order 10450 removed homosexuals from all areas of American government from 1953 until well into the 1970s. The impact of HUAC and the Lavender Scare was extraordinary – and largely hidden. In his 2020 book The War of the Deviants: The Homosexual vs. the United States of AmericaEric Cervini reports on the prosecution of around a million gays or lesbians in the United States between 1945 and 1960 and that Washington officials announced the “Program for the Elimination of Sexual Perversions” in the late 1940s.

Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback” expelled Mexican immigrants, including American citizens, from the United States

Millions of Mexicans entered the country legally through common immigration programs in the first half of the 20th century. Many of these immigrants were naturalized citizens at the time. Operation Wetback sent them back to Mexico, just as Trump claims he will do to immigrants if he is re-elected. This plan is also a fundamental principle of Project 2025.

The ongoing purge

But the attack on homosexuals was not unique to McCarthy, nor was it solely the purview of Republicans. The Subcommittee on Investigations was chaired by Democratic Senator Clyde R. Hoey from 1949 to 1952 and investigated “the employment of homosexuals in the federal workforce.” McCarthy took up this issue in the HUAC hearings when The Hoey Report found that all government intelligence agencies “strongly agree that sex perverts in the government pose a security risk.”

The head of the Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department’s vice squad, Lieutenant Roy Blick, had testified that there were 5,000 homosexuals living in Washington, DC and that around 3,700 were federal employees. This lit the fuse to weed these men and women out of government.

Chilling ripple effects

Eisenhower’s connection to McCarthy makes it clear that he was far from a benevolent leader and was in fact one of the most dangerous for lesbians and gay men, both at the time and in history. As noted activist Harry Hay later recounted New York Times“We lived in fear and terror almost every day of our lives.” The extent of the impact of the lavender scare was not reported in detail, but was reported in the 2017 documentary The Lavender Terror shows that men and women were persecuted by politicians even after they were dismissed from their government positions.

One example is Madeleine Tress, 24, who was working as an economist for the US Department of Commerce when two investigators working for the US Civil Service Agency called her. They told her they had evidence of her lesbian behavior. She was asked to take an oath. She asked for a lawyer and was told she couldn’t have one. Tress lost her job. Later, as the film explains, she also lost her Fulbright award. NPR published an interview with her in 2023, and the transcript is chilling.

These fortuitous effects of Executive Order 10450 illustrate what the confluence of McCarthy and Eisenhower with the Lavender Scare did for gays and lesbians. But the impact went far beyond job losses. Some people died by suicide after being outed because the impact was so devastating on multiple levels that they could not bear the consequences. They were labeled as deviants and marginalized in their respective professions.

Will history repeat itself?

Frank Kameny was working as an astronomer for the US Army Map Service when he was discharged in 1957 for homosexuality. Kameny tried repeatedly but was unable to find another job with the federal government after this firing.

The impact this had on Kameny made him one of the most important LGBTQ+ civil rights leaders who dedicated his life to the gay rights movement. Kameny was instrumental in founding the Mattachine Society of Washington in 1960. In 1965, four years before the Stonewall riots, Kameny demonstrated at the White House over gay rights. That same year, on July 4, Kameny led a gay rights picket line at Independence Hall that included veteran Philadelphia lesbian activist Barbara Gittings.

As the election approaches, we remember the history of what a seemingly benevolent president and a senatorial ideologue can do to threaten, terrorize, and even cause the death of entire groups of marginalized people. It’s a lesson worth revisiting, and a story that continues to influence LGBTQ+ history – past and present.

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation Newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines impacting LGBTQ+ communities around the world.

Don’t forget to share: