‘The Lavender Scare’ Tells a Turbulent History Through Dance

In the early years of the Cold War, when distrust of the Soviet Union fueled a Congressional witch hunt for communists in the U.S., another parallel fear penetrated the government. While the Red Scare is routinely covered in high school American history classes, the Lavender Scare remains largely unknown — though it lasted longer and directly affected more people.

For about 20 years, starting in the late 1940s, thousands of gay federal government employees were fired or forced to resign because of their sexuality.

“I was flabbergasted that I hadn’t heard of it before, as someone who’s in that community but also who loves history,” Zackery Betty said. The 33-year-old artistic director of Manchester, N.H., dance company NSquared Dance was a grad student studying choreography in 2022 when he learned the history.

He turned it into a dance. “Dance felt like the only language that was possible for it,” he said. “Because dance is a language of the body, it didn’t feel as intrusive to share this story. It felt almost like an invitation for learning and education.”

On Saturday, March 1, NSquared Dance brings The Lavender Scare to the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction for Shake the Cabin Fever. The event is a fundraiser for the Junction Dance Festival, a slate of free dance workshops and nominally priced performances running from July 12 to 20 in White River Junction, Barre and Lebanon, N.H. Now in its fourth year, the festival is designed to showcase local and regional dancers, nurture rising talent, and introduce the public to a variety of dance genres.

NSquared Dance staged an excerpt of The Lavender Scare at the festival last summer. The company continues to impress with its level of talent and its innovative performances, festival president and director Elizabeth Kurylo said. “I like to be surprised,” she added.

The Lavender Scare has become more relevant since its debut last summer due to a flurry of activity in Washington D.C. On the first day of his second term in office last month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that the federal government would recognize only two sexes: male and female. Trump has taken subsequent actions to bar transgender women and girls from competing in women’s sports, to ban transgender people from military service, and to assert greater control over the federal workforce.

Audiences will likely receive The Lavender Scare as more than a history lesson. The piece blends contemporary and modern dance to tell the story of two gay government employees in 1950s Washington, D.C. With 10 dancers, the 90-minute performance unspools as a series of vignettes that move between the main characters’ public and private lives. It opens in a typical office with mechanical movements to reflect rigid, monotonous work, Betty said. “And then at the end of that first scene, you see the gossip starting to happen.”

The action moves to Lafayette Park, a safe haven for same-sex couples to meet despite its location across the street from the White House. The next scene returns to the office. Tension rises, and an FBI interrogation ensues.

Recorded music is supplemented with audio excerpts from the 2017 documentary The Lavender Scare, written by David K. Johnson and directed by Josh Howard. Betty drew inspiration for his characters from Johnson’s book The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government, first published in 2004.

After delivering his well-known speech in West Virginia on February 9, 1950, claiming to have a list of 205 known communists working in the U.S. Department of State — a claim later debunked — senator Joseph McCarthy gave another speech, on the Senate floor, in which he offered specifics. Two people on the list were homosexuals, he said, and he implied that, as such, they were susceptible to communist recruitment because they had what he called “peculiar mental twists.”

Days later, deputy undersecretary of state John Peurifoy told a Senate subcommittee that the Department of State had ousted 91 gay employees as security risks.

“Political rhetoric increasingly linked ‘Communists and queers,'” archivist Judith Adkins wrote in Prologue, a magazine published by the National Archives and Records Administration. Her 2016 article covers the history of the period.

Starting in 1950, Congress conducted two investigations into homosexuality in the federal workforce. The larger of the two was run by “the Hoey committee,” named for committee chair and senator Clyde Hoey. It sent questionnaires to all branches of the military plus 53 civilian departments, including seemingly obscure ones, such as the American Battle Monuments Commission. While some agencies reported that gay people could make good employees, most deemed them unsuitable.

“The privilege of working for the United States Government should not be extended to persons of dubious moral character, such as homosexuals or sex perverts,” secretary of commerce Charles Sawyer wrote to the committee.

The D.C. police shared its arrest records with the committee, and the U.S. Park Police provided its “Pervert Records” to allow investigators to cross-check names of those arrested for homosexual activity with government employee records. The FBI instructed police across the country to indicate federal employment status on arrest records.

“A man could be picked up in California for responding to an undercover vice officer’s suggestive remarks — and end up losing his government job 2,000 miles away in Washington, D.C.,” Adkins wrote.

In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association’s first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classified homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance,” justifying continued discrimination.

The Hoey committee’s final report, sent abroad to U.S. embassies and foreign intelligence agencies, carried the authority of Congress and concluded that gay people should not be employed by the federal government because they were “generally unsuitable” and constituted “security risks.” In 1953, president Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order that effectively banned gay people from all jobs in the U.S. government, the country’s largest employer, Adkins wrote. Government contractors adopted similar hiring and firing practices.

In 1975, the Civil Service Commission finally issued new rules that said people could no longer be barred or fired from federal jobs because of their sexuality.

Historians estimate that between 5,000 and tens of thousands of gay workers lost their jobs during the Lavender Scare, Adkins wrote. “Suicide was not uncommon,” she added. “The total fallout in terms of ruined or truncated lives and wasted human potential is ultimately immeasurable.”

Betty’s choreography encompasses “the rumbles and the aftershocks” of Eisenhower’s executive order, he said. “And then there’s a rise, at the very end, of picketing and marching for equal rights within the work environment.”

Audience members are encouraged to wear lavender.

This article appears in Feb 26 – Mar 4, 2025.

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