But what is rather less well known is that McCarthyism was not merely a paranoid political response to the perceived Soviet infiltration of the US, but also manifested a phobic concern with homosexuality as an equally threatening and related form of subversive deviance.
Thus it was that the Second Red Scare was also tinted with lavender. In fact, the so-called Lavender Scare resulted in far more people being persecuted and hounded out of their jobs (or worse) than the more widely reported anti-communist campaign.
Both queers and reds were regarded as profoundly Un-American - that is to say, anti-God, anti-family, and anti-wholesomeness or what we might term apple-pie morality. They were believed to be actively conspiring to bring about a revaluation of sexual and cultural values and the overthrow of government.
For McCarthy and his supporters, someone such as Harry Hay was virtually the embodiment of evil and the link between political radicalism and perversion was proven beyond any shadow of a doubt. On one occasion McCarthy even brazenly announced to reporters that anyone who opposed him had to be either a communist or a cocksucker.
Happily, those of a lavender persuasion not only survived this ugly period in American history, but were strengthened by it. For ironically, the forerunners of today's LGBTQ movement came out of the McCarthy era; the Mattachine Society was founded in 1950, for example, followed by the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955.
As for old Joe, he died a broken man aged forty-eight, in 1957, from acute hepatitis (exacerbated by alcoholism), having been censured by the Senate three years earlier and seen his power and influence dramatically wane. As President Eisenhower is believed to have quipped, McCarthyism had become McCarthywasm.
Notes
See: David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare, (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
A feature-length documentary by Josh Howard based on the above work is presently in post-production.
