The Lavender Scare: How Fear and Prejudice Impacted a Nation in Crisis

Authors

Erin Owens, Georgia Southern University

Abstract

The Cold War time period was marked by fear and uncertainty. This was reflected by the treatment towards lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) individuals in the political and social spheres, known as the Lavender Scare. Policies such as Executive Order 10450 (1953) and the 1947 Sex Perversion Elimination Act prevented LGBTQ+ individuals from gaining meaningful employment and further complicated social stigma of gayness. The policies were primarily enacted to use queer individuals as scapegoats for the panic of the time and conflated the perceived moral corruption of Communists with the perceived moral corruption of LGBTQ+ individuals. The policies and social opinion worked together in a self-perpetuating cycle of increasing discrimination for queer individuals while inter-sectionally impacting issues like feminism.

First Page

115

Last Page

128

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Owens, Erin (2020) "The Lavender Scare: How Fear and Prejudice Impacted a Nation in Crisis," Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History: Vol. 10: Iss. 2, Article 8.
DOI: 10.20429/aujh.2020.100208
Available at: https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/aujh/vol10/iss2/8