'Lavendar Scare' documents little-known chapter of history

By Linda Fields
HAWLEY — It sometimes happens that you come across something so compelling that you charge ahead despite any hurdles you might expect to encounter. So it is with former 60-Minutes producer Josh Howard. Not one to shy away from a challenge, Howard is working to transform an academically written Ph.D thesis-turned-book into a full-length documentary. The film, titled “The Lavender Scare,” documents the government’s McCarthy-like witch hunt in the 1950s and '60s to identify and fire every federal employee suspected of being a homosexual. It's a piece of American history rarely talked about.

About four years ago, Howard came across the book of the same name written by David Johnson, associate professor of history of the University of South Florida.

“It wasn’t until the second half where Johnson started to introduce specific characters and tell their stories that bells went off — that old '60 Minutes' feeling (when you discover) a character who was a microcosm of a larger event," Howard said.

Faced with the enormous task of shooting, editing, writing, and securing the rights to historic film clips, Howard recruited former CBS News producer Jill Landes of Hawley.

First-person interviews
Howard and Landes had worked together at CBS News and later at the documentary unit for CNBC. Howard said he thinks she was the first person he called. He credits her with locating and arranging to interview everyone — from a low-level investigator to the Assistant Secretary of State during the 1950s who was responsible for drafting the policy and supervising the removal of gay people — and convinced them to go on camera.

Howard said those interviews turned out to be the backbone of his film. Those tasked with carrying out oppressive tactics rarely speak publicly about them.

“We didn’t realize it when we started this project but our documentary has turned out to be the last opportunity to get first-hand accounts from the people who lived through this sad chapter of our American history,” Landes said. “Most were quite surprised to hear from me, since nobody had ever asked them about the Lavender Scare, and they had never been interviewed about this subject. Some were family members of government employees who had committed suicide, and they had never understood why.”

Landes said she found a few subjects who thought the matter too painful to revisit. But most welcomed them into their homes.

“We took our cameras from one end of the country to the other," she said. "We talked to victims, early leaders of the LGBT rights movement, former government agents and even former high-level government officials. Some were past 90 years old and had served under Eisenhower and Truman.”

The campaign
At one point, said Howard, more than a thousand agents were assigned specifically to investigate the private lives of government employees. The government even went so far as to develop manuals with instructions on how to identify a gay person.

“A limp handshake was a sure giveaway,” Howard said, as was a man who was too well-groomed, or a woman who didn’t shave her legs. He said the agents who were interviewed varied in their feelings about what they did. Some were sorry about the entire project; others thought it was justified at that time, but not now; and still others who believed it was right then and would be today.

Howard estimates at least 10,000 people were victimized by this policy.

“We’ll never know the real number," Howard said. "The policy extended to private industry requiring government contractors to fire gay people, and a lot of people resigned when they learned they were under investigation.”

A conspiracy of silence
The history books have a lot to say about Senator Joe McCarthy and the blacklisting of Americans supposed to be Communists. But very little has been written about the systematic purge of gays employed by the government.

“In the 1950s, when it began, it was in nobody’s interest to talk about it," Howard said. "The gay people who were being fired didn’t want to tell their friends or family because it was a time when they were still in the closet and they needed to get on with their lives and get another job. The government didn’t want to go public with it because they would be asked why they were so sloppy in their hiring techniques.”

The government officials who instituted the policy said homosexuals were a threat to national security because they could be blackmailed.

“I think it’s important to know about history, and what it was like to be gay in the 1950s," said Howard. “There are still 29 states in our country in which it is perfectly legal to fire people based on their sexual orientation.”

Howard said federal civil rights legislation still does not explicitly protect gay people against discrimination.

“It is a cautionary tale about what could happen during times of concern over national security," he said. "In the late 1950s there was concern over communism. Today there’s concern over international terrorism. I think the story shows how easy it is to scapegoat any minority group and deny them civil rights in the name of patriotism and national security.”

Howard is certain his hard work will pay off.

“In addition to being an interesting historical story," he said. "I think it’s going to make some news.”