On Tue, 27 Nov 2007, joanna wrote:
> Scratch a conservative and find a repressed queer? That seems too simple
> somehow.
Not everyone whose afraid of something wants to be that something. As Norm MacDonald once said, I'm afraid of dogs...
But there clearly is a conservative current that does fear homosexuality as if it were the ultimate plot to overthrow the foundations of everything both public and private. Kind of like communism. David Johnson suggests in his book _The Lavender Scare_ that anti-gay hysteria was one of the deepest motive forces behind popular McCarthyism -- and this sort of thing suggests that what's happened over the last 50 years, as communism crumbled homosexuals liberated themselves, is that this current simply now speaks in its own name -- that all the tropes once attributed indirectly through godless communism and now attributed directly to godless homosexuality.
Here's a short excerpt from a review of Johnson's book in the LRB by Corey Robins:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/robi02_.html
LRB: 19 October 2006
Was he? Had he? Corey Robin
_The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government_ by David Johnson
<snip -- Robin is reviewing half a dozen books in this article>
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>
People are anti-gay rights for lots of reasons, and spectrums of reasons, and with some it's just inertia like it was with some for women's rights. But there has clearly always been a disproportionately influential group who think it's the end of the world.
Michael