THE LAVENDER SCARE.

AuthorShackford, Scott

Pride Month this June commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Inn riots in Greenwich Village, where gay men and women fought back against police raids. Stonewall is often associated with the start of the modern LGBT rights movement, but in actuality, efforts to stop government mistreatment of gay people went back more than a decade before 1969.

The Lavender Scare, which aired on PBS during Pride Month, documents President Dwight Eisenhower's 1953 executive order launching an official purge of homosexual federal employees. In the midst of fears of Communist spies infecting the government, gay men and women were declared to be security risks because their secret lives made them susceptible to blackmail.

This move was of course heaping...

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