From Matt, we're talking today about the lavender scare, which I have to admit I have not heard of before you pitched this episode.

So let's get into it. What was the lavender scare and why are you

interested in it? I'm mostly interested in it because it's a largely forgotten piece of LGBTQ history that also nicely dovetails with broader trends

in American culture and politics like immediately post war.

So what the lavender scale was,

was during the time of the McCarthyite hearings

and the second red scare and are you now

or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

Everyone remembers that.

Like that's a big part of our culture.

What's not well known is the tens of thousands of people employed by the federal

government who were let go during this time because they were dragged into a room and told information has come to light that you might be a homosexual. How do you respond? And I'll mostly be drawing from the lavender scare by David Kay Johnson, which really had access to like all of these internal government files and like once you read what people at the time were saying about this like it becomes really stark that this was like a top down effort to both sort of have like a masculine panic about gender roles in the US government but also as a way of like undoing the FDR reforms.

Okay, now that's an interesting point that you're putting on at that a masculine panic and you know I try to remember to theorize the revanchist transphobia today and that kind of stuff as this crisis of gender that's you know connected to the

various crises of today but what what do you mean by a masculine panic and why would

that be going on in the post-war period? Well this is the part that's forgotten

because I my basic thesis is that we remember the red scare because the red scare was a fig leaf for the lavender scare. Like we could publicly talk about oh oh there might be communist agents but what we couldn't really talk about was we're worried about sex and we're worried about gender that really comes through and you the op-ed at the time were like if more

women are hired by the federal government at the same and paid the same rate as men

then they won't be feel pressure to marry

and they'll marry later and our birth rates will decline

and that's communism.

Or another big thing was

all of these egg heads. That's what the right right wing opinions called on like all these egg heads at the State Department all of

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