Lavender Love
When Eliana West contacted me last year about contributing a story to a charity anthology put together in honor of Loving Day, I had just read an article about one of the very first gay rights protests in Washington, DC. Loving Day is a commemoration of the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia that ruled anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional and that the interracial marriage between Mildred and Richard Loving was, in fact, legal. I thought about writing an interracial love story. But this protest was sitting in my brain while I was brainstorming, and I thought — people have been fighting for the right to love and marry in a lot of different ways for a long time. So here’s a different take on that same theme.
As an aside, before I get into the history behind my story, I first became aware of Loving Vs. Virginia in high school when a social studies teacher showed the then-new 1996 movie Mr. and Mrs. Loving starring Lela Rochon and Timothy Hutton as the Lovings. According to Wikipedia, Mildred was not a fan — most of the movie script was pure fiction — but it got the point across to young me. Sometimes it really strikes me how wild it is that laws this harmful existed in the very recent past. The Loving decision happened before I was born, but my parents were in high school when the case was decided, so it wasn’t that long ago.
Anyway, back to the gay rights protest!
I spent a lot of time fretting while writing this story, wondering if I was providing enough context. I suspect this is history a lot of people don’t know. I didn’t want to bog the story down with a lot of exposition, though, so instead, I present to you this background information:
A lot of people think the LGBTQ+ rights movement started with Stonewall, but people were fighting for these rights in the decades prior. The story of LGBTQ+ people in America is more of a series of waves than a straight line. Briefly, there were thriving LGBTQ+ communities in American cities as early as the 1890s (probably earlier — drag has existed in some form for hundreds of years, for example). (I, in fact, wrote a novel that takes place in and around New York’s gay community in the 1890s.) Just last night, actually, I saw a short on PBS about the “pansy craze,” a time when entertainers who subverted gender thrived prior to World War II.
But then things changed. Although technically homosexual men were barred from serving in the Army, many served in both World Wars and, as you can probably imagine, putting a lot of men in the same space allowed men interested in men to find each other.
But then conservatives pushed LGBTQ+ people back into hiding after World War II. In the 1950s, the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare happened nearly simultaneously. Senator Joe McCarthy began his crusade against communism in 1950 with a speech in which he alleged that the US government had hundreds of communist employees in its ranks. His proof was ephemeral — his number of communists working in the government tended to fluctuate — but this speech and McCarthy’s meteoric rise to power led to a series of hearings in the Senate. (The House Un-American Activities Committee had been investigating communists and blacklisting Hollywood creatives in the late-1940s. McCarthy’s hearings were related but separate. Both committees seemed to define “communism” as “stuff we don’t like” so whether everyone branded as a communist actually was is up for debate.) (Sound familiar?)
On the other hand, there were communists in the United States. In the early twentieth century, a lot of young people joined communist clubs, especially on university campuses, because these organizations were generally anti-capitalist, obviously, but also pro-equality. Young people who supported full civil rights for people of color, for example, or LGBTQ+ rights were often involved with communist or communist-adjacent organizations. So some of the people McCarthy hauled in front of his committee decades later had been a part of a communist organization at some point in their lives, but the patriotic fervor of World War II had caused communism as a philosophy to fall out of favor. Perhaps this is why McCarthy and others eventually drew a line connecting communism and homosexuality; there were some overlaps in that Venn diagram.
One bit of American history that I am fascinated by is how closely connected nearly everything that happened in the 20th century was. McCarthy began holding hearings in which he belligerently accused everyone from Hollywood actors to government employees of being communists. His right-hand man was a fella from New York named Roy Cohn — yep, that Roy Cohn — who had a sidekick named David Schine. Schine was drafted into the Army in 1953, at which point Cohn pulled strings to get him a plumb assignment and special treatment. This naturally raised some eyebrows. It led to the Army-McCarthy hearings the next year, in which the Army accused McCarthy/Cohn of doing special favors for Schine, and McCarthy/Cohn accused the Army of having communists and homosexuals in their midst. This ultimately led to the Army’s chief counsel, Joseph Welch, to famously say to McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” The hearing went so awry that McCarthy’s career was effectively over after that — it was generally agreed he’d gone too far in stomping on the First Amendment — and he died just a few years later.
At the time, people assumed Cohn and Schine were lovers, is the notable point here, and it’s very possible they were. You may know Roy Cohn from such other misadventures as being the prosecutor in the Rosenberg trial and also from being good buddies Roger Stone and Donald Trump. (Cohn befriended Trump and started introducing him to powerful people such as President Reagan. So, we can thank Roy Cohn for our current ennui, I suppose.) (Cohn also pops up in a lot of New York history; he defended mob bosses in court and hung out at Studio 54, etc.) Anyway, Cohn was secretive about his private life, but it seems widely accepted that he was gay. He died of AIDS in 1986. (There’s a great HBO documentary called Bully, Coward, Victim about Roy Cohn that was made by the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, so its perspective is not exactly neutral, but it is very interesting. Also it’s worth noting that, once rumors started circling that Cohn was gay and had AIDS in the 1980s — rumors Cohn flatly denied despite evidence to the contrary — Trump basically abandoned him.) (Cohn was… not a good man. I don’t mean to valorize him here. Not all queer men were heroes. If anything, the likelihood that he and Schine were lovers makes Cohn’s hypocrisy all the more apparent.)
(Do we know who the Rosenbergs were? Julius was accused of sharing US nuclear secrets with the Russians shortly after World War II. Even if he was guilty — which I don’t think is a slam dunk — his wife Ethel probably had nothing to do with it but was pulled in anyway. Cohn and the prosecutors tried to get them to turn on each other; neither talked. They were convicted and executed in 1953.)
Anyway, the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare are, by the mid-1950s, intertwined, and as a result, the US government started purging gay men from its employ. That’s at the heart of my story in the anthology — my character, Pete, works for the State Department and is terrified he’ll be fired if anyone finds out he’s gay.
In real life, one of the men purged from his government job was an astronomer named Frank Kameny. He’d been arrested in San Francisco for lewd conduct but managed to get the charges dropped. (It’s worth noting that the definition of “lewd conduct” was pretty broad, lest anyone argue he deserved to be arrested.) Still, this was enough for him to lose his job, and he struggled to find other employment after that. He sued for wrongful termination and appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, who declined to hear his case. Kameny founded a chapter of the Mattachine Society — a gay rights organization — in Washington, DC, and it was Kameny who organized a picket for gay rights in front of the White House in April 1965.
Here’s some more background on the picket.
This picket was the inspiration for the story I wrote. Not coincidentally, this is probably one of the most explicitly political pieces of fiction I’ve ever written, in part because I’m disgusted by how history is repeating itself. Today, we have book bans, anti-trans legislation, drag show bans, and some right-wing groups pushing for marriage equality to be repealed. The goal is to run LGBTQ+ out of public life, or even to eradicate them — although anti-trans legislation is not explicitly violent, it strikes me that the goal of it is to make trans people not exist, which is not possible (trans people have always existed and will continue to exist) — which was also the goal back in the 1950s. J. Edgar Hoover kept files on “sexual deviants,” even though he likely was one himself. Anti-sodomy laws remained on the books until Lawrence v Texas in 2003. In New York City, being gay while drinking alcohol was considered disorderly conduct; pre-Stonewall, members of the Mattachine Society staged sip-ins in bars to protest the laws. It was also illegal to wear clothing of the opposite gender until surprisingly recently. And after decades of remarkable progress, we’re backsliding now.
So. My story idea started with this protest, thought to be the first gay rights protest in Washington. Kameny teamed up with the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian organization, to protest other government agencies in the following months. So the gay rights movement, in point of fact, did not start with the first brick at Stonewall — the raid at Stonewall was more of a last straw for people who had been agitating for LGBTQ+ rights in the decades leading up to it.
The story I wrote starts with two WWII Army vets who fall in love in the early 60s. I fictionalized a lot of elements of the story — the main characters are entirely products of my imagination — but the history is true. Gay men were purged from government jobs over a period starting in the early ’50s and through the ’60s. And this was the impetus for gay rights protests in Washington in the mid-‘60s.
I’ve written about some of this history in my novels before.
Such a Dance (set in the 1920s)
Ten Days in August (set in the 1890s)
I’m working on a longer novel set during the McCarthy era, so I’ve been reading a lot on this topic and can recommend further reading if this interests you!
Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington by James Kirchick
The Fifties: An Underground History by James R. Gaines
The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America by Eric Cervini
G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage
A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy by David M. Oshinsky
And, of course, you can get the whole anthology with my story in it here.
Also, one quick note about the language. “Gay” was in use as a term meaning “homosexual” by the 1960s, but mostly within the LGBTQ+ community, so Pete is a late adopter. On the other hand, I recently learned that Cary Grant totally meant “gay” in that way when he improvised the line “I just went gay all of a sudden!” in the 1938 screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby.
There’s some debate about whether this was the first piece of mainstream media to use the term “gay” in this context, and the joke likely whizzed by most of its audience. (Also, I just saw this movie for the first time a month ago and it’s great, you should watch it. Cary Grant as a strait-laced scientist, Katherine Hepburn as the ur-manic pixie dream girl, and a tiger named Baby. It’s an hour and forty-two minutes of chaos, and it’s delightful.) But my point is just that “gay” meaning “homosexual” existed well before the 1960s, so maybe Pete is a bit of a fuddy duddy. I’ll let you be the judge.