You're listening to the micro version of the Savage Lovecast at savage.love.

If you're stuck in a relationship quandary, or if you're looking for sexual harmony,

well, there's nothing you can't ask on the Savage Lovecast.

Back in the bad old days, they used to throw gaming and lesbians and other queer people

out of the army and out of the State Department and the Department of the Interior and the

Department of Energy and every other department because we were a security risk.

And we were a security risk because we could be

blackmailed. And we could be blackmailed for being gay or queer because we could be fired

for being gay or queer, which made us a blackmailable security risk that needed to be

fired. The logic here can really make your head hurt if you think about it, which no one did for decades

except the victims of this discriminatory logic.

Logic that went like this.

You can't serve in the military because you're a security risk and you're a security risk

because you can't serve in the military.

And the same went for the Department of State and defense and energy.

Anyway, I was thinking about the battle days,

the lavender scare in the 1950s and the 1960s when gay men and lesbians were thought to be

communists or assumed to be communists and purged from federal agencies, which went on from

actually the 50s or the 1980s, and then the ban on gays and lesbians serving in the military before

1994, and don't ask, don't tell, the law of the land banning gays and lesbians from serving in

the military from 1994 to 2011. All that led to anti-gay witch hunts on military bases, careers

were ruined, lives were ruined, but in some cases activists were created.

...