Queer History 130: The Lavender Scare

When Joe McCarthy Declared War on America's LGBTQIA+

In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy stood before a crowd in Wheeling, West Virginia, and launched what would become the most sustained attack on LGBTQIA+ Americans in the nation's history. While his speech focused on supposed Communist infiltration of the State Department, McCarthy's paranoid rantings about "security risks" would soon expand into a full-scale witch hunt against homosexual federal employees. This wasn't just political theater—this was the birth of the Lavender Scare, a systematic campaign of terror that would destroy thousands of lives and poison American democracy for decades.

McCarthy didn't just stumble upon anti-gay persecution as a political tool—he weaponized it with surgical precision. The bastard understood that while Americans might eventually get tired of hunting Communists, they would never tire of persecuting queers. Homophobia was the gift that kept on giving, a renewable resource of hatred that could fuel his political ambitions indefinitely. What began as an…