In the aftermath of World War II, a new conflict arose between the United States and the Soviet Union, the likes of which hadn’t been seen before. Both countries had strong militaries and were ideologically opposed between American capitalism and Soviet communism. But neither of them wanted to risk a full-blown war. The two countries entered a decades-long period of stalemate called the Cold War, a byproduct of which was the red scare in America.
The objective of the scare was to prevent communism from developing both within and outside the United States. Leftist politics came under suspicion, and any criticism of American policy could be seen as a hostile act. Senator Joseph McCarthy was the most vocal voice in this climate of fear, making claims that he had evidence of hundreds of communists working within the government. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a group that served to root out dissent against US policy, expelled thousands of people from their jobs in the federal government. Many artists, especially those in Hollywood, were blacklisted for suspected communist sympathies and unable to find work. Part of what made the scare so far reaching was the idea that anyone could be a communist or communist sympathizer.
THE LAVENDER SCARE
The government also orchestrated a witch hunt against gay people. As homosexuality came to be seen as a disease rather than a crime, politicians, journalists, and laymen began to fear that gay men and lesbians secretly lurked among them. This was known as the lavender scare. In many ways, this was a continuation of the purging of gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals from military service during the war, only broadened to the whole federal government. Executive Order 10450 required a thorough investigation of any federal government worker in the name of national security. Homosexuality was considered a threat and could therefore be grounds for dismissal from government jobs.
These investigations and laws forced gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals to conceal their sexuality even more than was common in the general population. Rumors alone were enough for someone to be brought under suspicion, and in order to defend themselves, people’s whole lives would come under scrutiny. Even if no proof could be determined, there was still the scandal of being investigated. After all, if someone was straight, why would they have been suspected in the first place? Homosexuals were characterized as mentally ill and morally unstable, and they were considered a security liability because they were at risk of being blackmailed. A closeted homosexual, the reasoning went, could be forced by foreign agents to divulge national secrets under the threat of exposure.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) is shown here at the White House in 1955. Under his administration, homosexuality became grounds for dismissal from federal jobs.
Although there was no blacklist in Hollywood for gay men and lesbians, the hostile climate of general homophobia created a fear of unemployment that kept many actors, screenwriters, and directors in the closet. The Motion Picture Production Hollywood Code of 1930, also called the Hays Code, stated that movies must maintain certain moral standards that, in effect, prohibited any depictions of homosexuality onscreen. The code was repealed in the late 1950s, and by the 1960s, material that had been banned was making its way back on screen. But even then, portrayals of queer people were uniformly negative. Such characters were portrayed as psychologically damaged or manipulative criminals. LGBTQ+ characters often died by the end of a movie, either in an accident, by suicide, or by murder. The same was true of literature of the time. Early fictional portrayals of homosexual, bisexual, or transgender people were considered scandalous. In an attempt to deflect accusations of promoting homosexuality, a publisher might even go so far as to claim that novels with these characters were meant as a psychological examination of the “homosexual illness.”
Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995), a successful author of crime novels, wrote the lesbian love story The Price of Salt under a pen name so that her writing career wouldn’t suffer.
Despite this, a number of novels with gay and bisexual content came out during this time, such as Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and John Rechy’s City of Night. The Price of Salt (1952), credited to Claire Morgan, tells the story of a young woman who begins a relationship with a married woman going through a divorce. The book was radical for the time, in that its two female lovers are happily together at the end of the book. When the novel was reprinted in 1990, it was revealed to have been written by popular mystery author Patricia Highsmith, who had originally published the book using a pseudonym.
THE FIRST PUBLIC TRANSGENDER HERO
Christine Jorgensen, designated male at birth, was born in New York City in 1926 as George Jorgensen Jr. She would later describe her childhood as happy, but as she grew older the feeling of being a woman in a man’s body frustrated her. During World War II, she served in the army and was honorably discharged. After returning to civilian life, she decided to seek gender affirmation surgery, then a radical new procedure, at the age of twenty-four.
Jorgensen’s transition, which began with two years of hormone therapy, was completed in 1952 with the gender affirmation surgery performed in Denmark by Dr. Christian Hamburger. On her return to the United States in 1955, she made headlines in the daily tabloids and even in newspapers like the New York Times. Jorgensen was public about her transitional procedures and was the first transgender person to discuss them publicly. She later went on tour to give lectures and perform in clubs, where her signature song became “I Enjoy Being a Girl"
A ZOOLOGIST WALKS INTO A SOCIOLOGY CLASS...
In the middle of all this, one of the most important developments in the gay rights movement happened. It did not come from a homophile organization, but it came, in fact, from a class on marriage at Indiana University taught by, of all people, a zoologist.
Alfred Kinsey was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1894 to a Methodist family with Quaker roots. He was often ill, and his family lived in poverty. Because of his illness, he was unable to play rough with the other boys, who consequently looked down on him as being too meek.
Alfred Kinsey (center, facing camera) and his staff are shown here at work in 1953.
Graduating from Harvard in 1919 with a doctorate in biology, Kinsey had focused his studies on insects and went on to become a respected professor in zoology. It was while teaching at Indiana University in 1938 that he discovered how much misinformation his students had about sex and sexuality and how little scientific research there was about it.
This led Kinsey to begin researching sexual behavior. He was not the first person to study sex. Magnus Hirschfeld preceded him, as did nineteenth-century sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebbing and Henry Havelock Ellis. However, Kinsey was the first to approach the field with rigorous scientific methodology.
THE KINSEY SCALE
In 1944, Kinsey applied for and received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation that allowed him to conduct a series of interviews with more than five thousand men. These interviews asked a wide range of questions about their sexual experiences and beliefs. The results were published in 1948 in the book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and the results were shocking.
Kinsey had proven through a scientific collection of data that much of what was considered obscure or deviant behavior at the time was actually fairly common. Of the men interviewed, it was found that 37 percent had experienced satisfactory sex with other men; 10 percent were exclusively homosexual; and 50 percent experienced sexual attraction to other men. His findings also suggested that bisexuality was more common than previously thought.
Kinsey also established from his research the idea of a scale of sexuality, called the Kinsey scale. He presented a scale of 0 (strictly heterosexual) to 6 (strictly homosexual), with five different degrees of bisexuality in between.
The book was controversial, yet also very popular. It became a best-seller. Kinsey’s strongly objective methodology made the book a public spectacle. Every statistic he presented could be backed up by thorough research and analysis. Refining his research methods further, in 1953 he released Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which revealed similar statistics about his female subjects.
By this point, Kinsey and his work were upsetting a lot of people, so much so that religious leaders and conservative politicians pressured the Rockefeller Foundation to cut his funding. Kinsey was also branded as an anti-American subversive with communist sympathies. Kinsey was unable to publish his research. He died in 1956 of pneumonia and heart problems.
THE VALUE AND SHORTCOMINGS OF KINSEY'S WORK
There are some criticisms concerning Kinsey’s work. His interview subjects were almost uniformly white and middle class, as well as predominantly American, and there were not any transgender subjects included in the interviews. Additionally, his statistics were taken from a comparatively small group of subjects. While his research did challenge existing ideas about sexuality, they are not a terminal analysis of human sexuality as a whole.
However, his research gave scientific evidence that revealed heterosexuality in a new light, and rather than being viewed as an aberration, homosexuality and bisexuality proved to be much more prevalent than once thought. His work helped change the way people looked at homosexuals and bisexuals and enabled the ongoing field of research on sexuality and gender. Kinsey broke the dominant narrative of “deviant sexuality” as being pathological. He further normalized the idea of queer identities when he wrote:
If all persons with any trace of homosexual history, or those who were predominantly homosexual, were eliminated from the population today, there is no reason for believing that the incidence of the homosexual in the next generation would be materially reduced. The homosexual has been a significant part of human sexuality ever since the dawn of history, primarily because it is an expression of capacities that are basic in the human animal.
In other words, the existence of gay and queer people cannot be eradicated because nonheteronormative sexualities cannot be predicted or prevented. But it is not abnormal to hold such an identity, and it is not a new state of being.