On Tue, 24 Oct 2006, Doug Henwood quoted Susie Bright saying:
> "http://susiebright.blogs.com/susie_brights_journal_/2006/10/how_safe_is_you.html"
>
> October 23, 2006
<snip>
> These murders happened in 1949, a half century ago, and are related as a
> history lesson from George Chauncey Jr.'s article, "The Postwar Sex Crime
> Panic" (True Stories From the American Past). Obviously, given the time
> frame, there was no fast food, dope, rap music, or gay congressmen to pin
> the blame on. No porn videos, or even Playboy magazine. People did not say
> "fuck" in The New Yorker at the time these kids were murdered.
>
> Nevertheless, these deaths spurred parents and legislators into a
> first-class sex panic, the first real doozy after the war. How could these
> things happen in America? How could we fight enemies abroad and then face
> this in our neighborhoods? This wasn't the face of communism or fascism;
> it was something much more frightening, a group of predators destroying
> the very littlest, the most innocent.
Fwiw, the impression you get from Corey Robin's LRB review article of David Johnson's book _The Lavender Scare_, quoted in this space last week, is that (a) this sex panic had already underway for two years before these crimes occurred, and (b) there was in fact a very firm (if very weird) connection between communism and perversion in the American popular mind at this time:
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20061009/020119.html
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/robi02_.html>
October 19, 2006 The London Review of Books
Was he? Had he? Corey Robin
The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government by David Johnson · Chicago, 277 pp, £13.00
According to John Cheever, 1948 was `the year everybody in the United States was worried about homosexuality'. And nobody was more worried than the federal government, which was rumoured to be teeming with gays and lesbians. One might think that Washington's attentions would have been focused elsewhere - on the Soviet Union, for example, or on Communist spies - but in 1950, President Truman's advisers warned him that `the country is more concerned about the charges of homosexuals in the government than about Communists.' The executive branch responded immediately. That year, the State Department fired `perverts' at the rate of one a day, more than twice the figure for suspected Communists. Charges of homosexuality ultimately accounted for a quarter to a half of all dismissals in the State and Commerce Departments, and in the CIA. Only 25 per cent of Joseph McCarthy's fan letters complained of `red infiltration'; the rest fretted about `sex depravity'.
The scare lasted from 1947 to the 1970s, and in The Lavender Scare David Johnson estimates that thousands lost their jobs. The men and women charged with rinsing the pink from the Potomac were astonishingly ignorant about their quarry. Senator Clyde Hoey, head of the first congressional inquiry into the threat, had to ask an aide: `Can you please tell me, what can two women possibly do?' Senator Margaret Chase Smith asked one Hoey Committee witness whether there wasn't a `quick test like an X-ray that discloses these things'.
The official justification for the purge was that homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail and could be turned into Soviet spies. But as Johnson points out, investigators never found a single instance of this kind of blackmail during the Cold War. The best they could come up with was a dubious case from before the First World War, when the Russians allegedly used the homosexuality of Austria's top spy to force him to work for them.
The real justification was even more suspect: gays were social misfits whose pathology made them susceptible to Communist indoctrination. Many conservatives also believed that the Communist Party was a movement of and for libertines, and the Soviet Union a haven of free love and open marriage. Gays, they concluded, couldn't resist this freedom from bourgeois constraint. Drawing parallels with the decline of the Roman Empire, McCarthy regarded homosexuality as a cultural degeneracy that could only weaken the United States. It was, as one tabloid put it, `Stalin's Atom Bomb'.
<end excerpt>
Michael