Post by addisona on Jun 4, 2022 7:37:02 GMT
The Long, Sordid History of the Gay Conspiracy Theory Today’s right-wing campaign against “groomers” is America’s latest moral panic
A specter is haunting America — the specter of sexual degeneracy.
Across the country, Republican state legislators are proposing bills to prohibit discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in classrooms, purportedly to “protect” students from the perverted designs of predatory gay teachers. Prominent right-wing activists bandy about groomer as a term of opprobrium, accusing their political adversaries of trying to sexually exploit children while invoking hoary stereotypes of gay men being pedophiles. According to PEN America, a third of the books banned in public schools over the past academic year contain LGBTQ+ characters and themes. And in a troubling sign that a movement once confined to the fringes of American politics may be shaping its contours for years to come, some 30 candidates pledging fealty to QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory envisioning a ring of cannibalistic child-sex traffickers at the heart of the American republic, are running for Congress.
Sensing political opportunity, some Republicans in Washington have exploited the passions brewing in the provinces. During last month’s confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley attempted to outdo each other in flinging accusations that the newest addition to the Supreme Court had betrayed a soft spot for child-sex predators during her tenure as a federal district court judge. Outgoing representative Madison Cawthorn raised eyebrows with his tales of “the sexual perversion” — specifically, cocaine-fueled orgies — “that goes on in Washington.” Responding to news of an infant-formula shortage, Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking House Republican, blamed “pedo grifters.”
moral panics are nothing new in America. “We ought to learn by our mistakes,” President Harry Truman bitterly complained in 1950 as Senator Joseph McCarthy accused him and his administration of knowingly harboring communist subversives. “We’ve repeated this sort of hysteria over and over in our history,” Truman continued, reeling off a series of dates referring to the Salem witch trials, the Alien and Sedition Acts, an Anti-Masonic Party presidential campaign, the cresting of the anti-Catholic Know Nothing movement, the founding of the Ku Klux Klan, and the first Red Scare.
While McCarthyism would exhaust itself several years before the death of its namesake in 1957, a concurrent mass frenzy, chillingly resonant with the present-day fixation over sexual degenerates atop the commanding heights of American politics, would continue for decades. In December 1950, just a few weeks after Truman issued his gripe about the perennial susceptibility of his countrymen to moral panics, a Senate investigative subcommittee released the bipartisan report “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government.” Commissioned in response to the shocking revelation, uttered in passing by an undersecretary of State at a congressional hearing earlier that year, that the State Department had dismissed 91 employees on the grounds of homosexuality, the report stated, “One homosexual can pollute a Government office.”
During the 1952 election that would see them achieve control over both houses of Congress and the White House for the first time since the Great Depression, Republicans placed the problem of gays in the State Department — or, as McCarthy’s colleague Everett Dirksen colorfully called them, “the lavender lads” — at the front and center of their campaign. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover disseminated the rumor that the Democratic presidential nominee, divorced former diplomat Adlai Stevenson, was one such violet-hued fellow. (That Hoover himself was the subject of similar whisperings because of his conspicuous bachelorhood and hobby of collecting antiques — a pursuit commonly associated with gay men at the time — in no way inhibited him from destroying the lives and careers of countless gay people over the course of his nearly half-century career as the most powerful man in American law enforcement.) About three months after taking office, President Dwight Eisenhower fulfilled his party’s pledge to “clean up the mess in Washington” by signing Executive Order 10450, prohibiting those guilty of “sexual perversion” — gays and lesbians — from working for the federal government or federal contractors. Not until 1975 was the gay ban in the civil service lifted, and it would take another two decades for President Bill Clinton to overturn the prohibition on gay people receiving security clearances.
As the long tail of the “Lavender Scare” demonstrates, and what the current spate of bills stigmatizing gay people as sexual predators lamentably still shows, fear of homosexuality has played a large, yet largely unappreciated, role in American politics and society. It has impacted not just gay people but the country itself, poisoning perceptions of reality and dividing us unnecessarily. Thousands of qualified people lost their jobs, and untold numbers more refrained from entering public service because of the irrational terror homosexuality once inspired in the hearts of most Americans.
Central to this fear has been the sense that gay people, by virtue of the secrecy once intrinsic to their existence, operate through subterfuge. (At the signing ceremony for the Parental Rights in Education law, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law by critics, Florida governor Ron DeSantis declared that the measure’s opponents “support sexualizing kids in kindergarten” and “camouflage their true intentions.”) The fear underwent a dramatic change during World War II, when the concept of national security became a paramount concern and the federal government began developing a bureaucracy for the management of confidential information. If, prior to America’s rise as a global superpower, the conventional view of homosexuality held it to be immoral and a mental illness, by the time the Cold War began, it was elevated to a national-security threat, with gays allegedly more vulnerable to blackmail and therefore potentially enemies of the state. Sexual and political nonconformity came to be conflated, and “sexual deviants” assumed a place in the American political imagination rivaled only by, and frequently intertwined with, that of communists. Indeed, the standing of the homosexual was worse. A communist could leave the party, repent of his evil ways, and inform on his erstwhile comrades. Medically pathologized, morally condemned, and legally proscribed, the homosexual had no such escape from his fate.
Compelled to live in secret, gay people became fodder for all manner of political agendas and social anxieties. What some now lightheartedly refer to as a “velvet mafia” operating in certain artistic fields like fashion and entertainment once had sinister connotations. Gays were accused of subverting schools, communities, even whole nations, and it’s within the context of this long and ignoble history that the present hysteria over malevolent “groomers” working surreptitiously to corrupt the country’s youth must be understood. To comprehend America’s latest moral panic, it is necessary to recognize homophobia as not only a form of prejudice like any other but as a conspiracy theory.
nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/05/the-long-sordid-history-of-the-gay-conspiracy-theory.html
A specter is haunting America — the specter of sexual degeneracy.
Across the country, Republican state legislators are proposing bills to prohibit discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in classrooms, purportedly to “protect” students from the perverted designs of predatory gay teachers. Prominent right-wing activists bandy about groomer as a term of opprobrium, accusing their political adversaries of trying to sexually exploit children while invoking hoary stereotypes of gay men being pedophiles. According to PEN America, a third of the books banned in public schools over the past academic year contain LGBTQ+ characters and themes. And in a troubling sign that a movement once confined to the fringes of American politics may be shaping its contours for years to come, some 30 candidates pledging fealty to QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory envisioning a ring of cannibalistic child-sex traffickers at the heart of the American republic, are running for Congress.
Sensing political opportunity, some Republicans in Washington have exploited the passions brewing in the provinces. During last month’s confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley attempted to outdo each other in flinging accusations that the newest addition to the Supreme Court had betrayed a soft spot for child-sex predators during her tenure as a federal district court judge. Outgoing representative Madison Cawthorn raised eyebrows with his tales of “the sexual perversion” — specifically, cocaine-fueled orgies — “that goes on in Washington.” Responding to news of an infant-formula shortage, Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking House Republican, blamed “pedo grifters.”
moral panics are nothing new in America. “We ought to learn by our mistakes,” President Harry Truman bitterly complained in 1950 as Senator Joseph McCarthy accused him and his administration of knowingly harboring communist subversives. “We’ve repeated this sort of hysteria over and over in our history,” Truman continued, reeling off a series of dates referring to the Salem witch trials, the Alien and Sedition Acts, an Anti-Masonic Party presidential campaign, the cresting of the anti-Catholic Know Nothing movement, the founding of the Ku Klux Klan, and the first Red Scare.
While McCarthyism would exhaust itself several years before the death of its namesake in 1957, a concurrent mass frenzy, chillingly resonant with the present-day fixation over sexual degenerates atop the commanding heights of American politics, would continue for decades. In December 1950, just a few weeks after Truman issued his gripe about the perennial susceptibility of his countrymen to moral panics, a Senate investigative subcommittee released the bipartisan report “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government.” Commissioned in response to the shocking revelation, uttered in passing by an undersecretary of State at a congressional hearing earlier that year, that the State Department had dismissed 91 employees on the grounds of homosexuality, the report stated, “One homosexual can pollute a Government office.”
During the 1952 election that would see them achieve control over both houses of Congress and the White House for the first time since the Great Depression, Republicans placed the problem of gays in the State Department — or, as McCarthy’s colleague Everett Dirksen colorfully called them, “the lavender lads” — at the front and center of their campaign. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover disseminated the rumor that the Democratic presidential nominee, divorced former diplomat Adlai Stevenson, was one such violet-hued fellow. (That Hoover himself was the subject of similar whisperings because of his conspicuous bachelorhood and hobby of collecting antiques — a pursuit commonly associated with gay men at the time — in no way inhibited him from destroying the lives and careers of countless gay people over the course of his nearly half-century career as the most powerful man in American law enforcement.) About three months after taking office, President Dwight Eisenhower fulfilled his party’s pledge to “clean up the mess in Washington” by signing Executive Order 10450, prohibiting those guilty of “sexual perversion” — gays and lesbians — from working for the federal government or federal contractors. Not until 1975 was the gay ban in the civil service lifted, and it would take another two decades for President Bill Clinton to overturn the prohibition on gay people receiving security clearances.
As the long tail of the “Lavender Scare” demonstrates, and what the current spate of bills stigmatizing gay people as sexual predators lamentably still shows, fear of homosexuality has played a large, yet largely unappreciated, role in American politics and society. It has impacted not just gay people but the country itself, poisoning perceptions of reality and dividing us unnecessarily. Thousands of qualified people lost their jobs, and untold numbers more refrained from entering public service because of the irrational terror homosexuality once inspired in the hearts of most Americans.
Central to this fear has been the sense that gay people, by virtue of the secrecy once intrinsic to their existence, operate through subterfuge. (At the signing ceremony for the Parental Rights in Education law, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law by critics, Florida governor Ron DeSantis declared that the measure’s opponents “support sexualizing kids in kindergarten” and “camouflage their true intentions.”) The fear underwent a dramatic change during World War II, when the concept of national security became a paramount concern and the federal government began developing a bureaucracy for the management of confidential information. If, prior to America’s rise as a global superpower, the conventional view of homosexuality held it to be immoral and a mental illness, by the time the Cold War began, it was elevated to a national-security threat, with gays allegedly more vulnerable to blackmail and therefore potentially enemies of the state. Sexual and political nonconformity came to be conflated, and “sexual deviants” assumed a place in the American political imagination rivaled only by, and frequently intertwined with, that of communists. Indeed, the standing of the homosexual was worse. A communist could leave the party, repent of his evil ways, and inform on his erstwhile comrades. Medically pathologized, morally condemned, and legally proscribed, the homosexual had no such escape from his fate.
Compelled to live in secret, gay people became fodder for all manner of political agendas and social anxieties. What some now lightheartedly refer to as a “velvet mafia” operating in certain artistic fields like fashion and entertainment once had sinister connotations. Gays were accused of subverting schools, communities, even whole nations, and it’s within the context of this long and ignoble history that the present hysteria over malevolent “groomers” working surreptitiously to corrupt the country’s youth must be understood. To comprehend America’s latest moral panic, it is necessary to recognize homophobia as not only a form of prejudice like any other but as a conspiracy theory.
nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/05/the-long-sordid-history-of-the-gay-conspiracy-theory.html