# Lavender Scare The **state-sponsored persecution of gay and lesbian federal employees** during the early Cold War, running roughly **1950 to the late 1970s** but most intense in the years immediately following President **Dwight D. Eisenhower's Executive Order 10450** (April 27, 1953), which formally categorized "sexual perversion" as grounds for federal dismissal and security-clearance denial. The justification was that homosexuals were uniquely vulnerable to blackmail by foreign agents — a self-fulfilling premise, since the blackmail risk only existed because the state itself made homosexuality a fireable offense. ## Scale An estimated **5,000–10,000 federal employees** were fired or forced to resign on grounds of sexuality during the Lavender Scare's most active years. Some committed suicide. The State Department was the most aggressive purger. The dismissals were never publicly justified case by case — the policy ran in a parallel security-clearance shadow process that did not afford due process. ## Twin of [[McCarthyism]] The Lavender Scare ran **alongside and intertwined with** Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist Red Scare. The two were rhetorically and operationally linked: McCarthy and [[Roy Cohn]] explicitly conflated communism and homosexuality as twin threats to "Americanism," and the same congressional and executive machinery was used to purge both. The Lavender Scare outlasted McCarthy's downfall by more than two decades. ## Legal End Executive Order 10450's explicit anti-LGBTQ provisions were repealed only in **1995** (under [[Bill Clinton]]); the broader formal ban on LGBTQ security clearances ended around the same time. The order itself was fully revoked by [[Barack Obama]] in **2017** via Executive Order 13764. The Lavender Scare is the direct policy ancestor of [[Don't Ask Don't Tell]] (1993–2011) in the military context. ## Place in the Vault The Lavender Scare is the **canonical case study** for how state-security ideology gets weaponized against sexual minorities, and the template for the 2025–26 federal-workforce purges currently being pursued against LGBTQ employees, DEI offices, and trans service members. See [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] for the full arc. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[McCarthyism]]