Trump Administration Playbook Takes Tactics from Lavender Scare of the Cold War

A defining feature of the mid-20th century was the government-wide panic over communism, anarchism, and other leftist beliefs known as the Red Scare. However what many don’t know is that an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 government employees were fired or forced to resign during that same time period, solely because they were suspected or confirmed to be queer. This purge of queer people from government jobs further instilled distrust of the LGBTQ community by the general public under the guise of protecting national security. It’s called the Lavender Scare.

The tactics of the Lavender Scare mirrored and contributed to the Red Scare, a broader cultural firestorm that famously led to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate hearings against alleged communists. But as efforts to actually reveal communists in the State Department stalled, McCarthy and his allies increasingly linked “suspected communist behavior” to homosexuality, claiming that gay state employees were more susceptible to blackmail by communists and therefore posed a pernicious threat to the nation’s security.

Whereas most people know about the Red Scare and learned about it in school, the harms of the Lavender Scare remain widely undiscussed in history classes or popular culture at large. The playbook the government used to classify queer people as a threat to national security was in the works long before the mass firings came to a head — and it's a playbook we see the Trump administration using today to attack the LGBTQ community at large.

Government officials encouraging everyday people to report others who displayed “homosexual behavior” was an especially insidious element of the Lavender Scare, and was a directive that stretched far beyond just the federal government. In Florida, for example, politicians launched a watchdog group known as the Johns Committee to “preserve Southern customs and weed out subversives.” Led by Senator Charley E. Johns, the committee honed in on schools in particular and encouraged educators, students, administrators, and everyday people to report Black activists, leftists, LGBTQ people, and other populations displaying what they perceived as communist tendencies. The ACLU of Florida formed in 1955 to combat these targeted crusades on the rise.

Taking a page from the Johns Committee playbook 70 years later,the FBI opened a tip line in June 2025 and requested people report teachers who “promote gender ideology” and providers of gender-affirming care.. And just last month, the Department of Justice attempted to force health care providers to hand over the identities and sensitive information of transgender youth who have received gender-affirming care. This is a blatant violation of the trans youth and their families’ right to privacy. The ACLU is suing the Trump administration to block this effort in court.

These directives have far-reaching effects: They turn neighbor against neighbor, incentivize people to surveil children, and normalize the restriction of safe and critical health care. States across the country support this agenda by introducing laws that criminalize or push health care out of reach for many trans kids. Along with our affiliates, the ACLU is fighting these attacks.

Throughout the mid-20th century, countless service members were interrogated by military officials to confess homosexual ideation or identity. Service members were even asked the question “do you have homosexual tendencies?” on the day of their induction into the Army. The narrative of the time was that queer service members were more susceptible to blackmail, morally weak, and therefore unfit to serve. Tens of thousands of service members were forced to leave the military with less than honorable discharges, a vestige of the country that rejected them solely for who they were and who they loved.

President Trump has similarly made it a priority to weed queer people out of Armed Services. Just one week after taking office again, Trump issued an executive order claiming trans people were incapable of the "honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle" necessitated by military service. The president claims that the acceptance of trans service members is detrimental to the “cohesion” of the military, which is a lie that has been weaponized against every minority group that has joined or tried to join the military throughout history, including Black people, women, and other members of the LGBTQ community. Though Trump’s campaign against the small portion of the military that are transgender (less than half of 1%) continues, an appeals court partially blocked the order banning trans service members at the beginning of this month after the Supreme Court reinstated the order in May 2025.

A cornerstone of the Lavender Scare was to convince the public that members of the LGBTQ community were a threat to children and traditional American family values. A report from the Hoey Committee, for example, best exemplified this effort. Senator Clyde R. Hoey established this Senate subcommittee to determine the extent to which homosexuality was present in the government workforce through an investigation. The report, titled “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government,” ultimately concluded that homosexuals were "unsuitable for employment in the federal government.” It served as the precursor to an executive order from President Eisenhower in 1953 that effectively prohibited queer people from working for the federal government altogether. The report itself includes testimony from officials across the federal government declaring that queer people are morally unfit and perverted, without any valid evidence. This misrepresentation only further fed the prejudice against LGBTQ people across the nation.

Today, the Trump administration consistently suggests “gender ideology” is a threat to children and his idealized vision of the nuclear family, claiming “the evil and backwards lies of gender insanity are robbing our children of their happiness, health, and freedom, while imposing unimaginable heartbreak on parents and families.” They’ve censored doctors, researchers, educators, artists, and government workers from even mentioning the existence of transgender people, all while restricting the freedom of families with transgender youth. It is not a particularly new or novel strategy to disguise fear of LGBTQ people as coming from a need to “protect children,” often bolstered by dangerous lies about the LGBTQ community.

Until the 1970s, homosexuality was classified as a mental illness by the medical establishment and the public at large. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1952 labeled homosexuals as having a “sociopathic personality disturbance,” and psychiatrists were called to testify on the matter in Congressional hearings. This harmful diagnosis gave further rise to violent forms of conversion therapy, which often included electroshock treatments, sleep deprivation, and induced vomiting designed to make LGBTQ people fear their own sexual desires, identities, or partners. Elected officials used this classification of queerness as a mental disorder to justify these extreme injustices.

This often fell hardest on Black queer people and Black trans people in particular, for whom the violent oppression of the Jim Crow era converged with the Lavender Scare. One case that embodies this plight is that of Ava Betty Brown, a Black trans woman who was arrested in 1957 for cross-dressing, which was then considered to be a psychiatric disorder. Brown was arrested, forced by the police to undress, and ultimately found guilty at trial. She would go on to be repeatedly arrested and even beaten by law enforcement officers, all because of how she dressed. By the time the DSM removed the classification of mental illness in 1973, an entire population was already outlawed from public acceptance.

This stigmatization laid the groundwork for anti-LGBTQ politicians of today to push their agenda against the queer community. The Trump administration has strongly implied that being transgender is a mental disorder, and has used this rhetoric to support efforts to restrict gender-affirming care. Through executive orders and other rules, the administration has tried to coerce doctors who affirm transgender youth’s identities into dropping their transgender patients. The administration has also pathologized queerness as a means to force transgender people out of government jobs, including efforts to prevent trans federal workers from using the correct bathroom or access the health care they need. Activists close to the administration have made clear they see transgender youth as “low-hanging fruit” and that their actual goal is to outlaw access to gender-affirming care for transgender people regardless of age, and push transgender people out of public life entirely.

State-sanctioned discrimination against the LGBTQ community didn’t start in the 1950s with the Lavender Scare, and it didn’t end there either. For years and even decades after the final trials of the Lavender Scare, government workers who were forced out of their jobs remained in a shadow of exclusion, cast out from the life they knew without any recompense or justice. Countless people were rejected from their families and communities due to allegations of queerness that came from these unjust firings. Some even died by suicide as a result of the persecution.

The Lavender Scare was a scorched-earth approach to rid the government of queer people and intimidate queer people in the general population, too. But it was in response to this oppression that the Gay Rights Movement took shape. For the first time in American history, LGBTQ people were effectively pushed out of the closet en masse. As much as there was immense danger in this loss of anonymity, there was also liberation inherent in it.

Years before the Stonewall uprising of 1969, widely understood to be the start of the modern gay rights movement, many people of the LGBTQ community moved through the anguish of their ostracization by building toward a better world. In fact, the Mattachine Society, the first sustained gay rights organization in the nation, was formed in 1950 as the Lavender Scare was in full swing. If there’s one thing the queer community knows how to do, it’s survive oppression and do so with joy and resistance. As the ACLU fights attacks on LGBTQ rights in courts and state houses across the nation, we’re reminded that we as a community have been here before, and we have overcome.