Chapter 18: "The Age of McCarthy," from Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History form 1869 to the Present

On Thursday, February 9, 1950, an obscure first-term senator from Wisconsin named Joseph R. McCarthy (1908-57) gave a Lincoln’s Birthday dinner address to an audience of 275 Republican women in Wheeling, West Virginia. Midway through his speech, McCarthy waved a piece of paper and announced, “I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” The following evening, in Salt Lake City, where the senator made another speech, the number of card-carrying Communist Party members employed by the U.S. State Department had fallen to fifty-seven. In Reno the following day, the senator again claimed fifty-seven but would only name four.

McCarthy was startled by the national attention that his charges gained. He later said that the scrap of paper he waved so dramatically in Wheeling was actually a laundry list. As his biographer Richard H. Rovere observed, McCarthy discovered communism “almost by inadvertence, as Columbus discovered America, as James Marshall discovered California gold.”

It was the height of the Cold War. The Soviet Union had the bomb, presumably thanks to American spies; China had been “lost.” Within five months, North Korean soldiers would march across the 38^th parallel, and the nation would once again find itself at war. American were obsessed with loyalty, with “the enemy within” as much with the enemy without. Whether it was 205 State Department Communists or fifty-seven or just four didn’t particularly matter—truth and accuracy were less important than the great anti-Communist crusade. The Age of McCarthyism had begun.

Less than three weeks after the Wheeling speech, Undersecretary of State John Perifoy testified before a Senate committee investigating the loyalty of government workers. He was asked how many State Department employees had resigned while under investigation for being security risks since 1947. “Ninety-one persons in the shady category,” Peurifoy answered. “Most of these were homosexuals.”

Suddenly, another domestic enemy had emerged—homosexuals or “perverts” or “deviates,” in the language of the fifties (even the headlines of the stately New York Times used the word perverts, just as the newspaper referred to Communists as “Reds”). The Republican opposition found another weapon to use against President Harry S. Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson. McCarthy immediately joined the fray, telling a Senate subcommittee that a “flagrantly homosexual” State Department employee, dismissed as a security risk, had had his job restored because of pressure from a high official. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Guy George Gabrielson, warned in a letter to the party faithful that “perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists are the sexual perverts who have infiltrated our Government in recent years. . . . It is the talk of Washington.” After a Washington D.C., vice squad officer named Lieutenant Roy E. Blick told the Senate that there were 5,000 perverts in Washington, 4,500 of them employed by government agencies, a Senate subcommittee launched an investigation.

Antigay hysteria became widespread. Right-wingers charged that the State Department was the target of gay “infiltration,” just as it was the target of Communist infiltration. Shortly before the 1950 congregational elections, John O’Donnell, the New York Daily News political commentator, wrote, “The primary issue is . . . the charge that the foreign policy of the U.S., even before World War II, was dominated by an all-powerful, super-secret inner circle of highly educated, socially highly placed sexual misfits in the State Department, all easy to blackmail, all susceptible to blandishments by homosexuals in foreign nations.” Rumors abounded that Adolf Hitler had compiled a list of homosexuals throughout the world who could be enlisted for espionage, sabotage, and terrorism. The alleged list bore an uncanny resemblance to the “Black Book” of 47,000 English “perverts” supposedly in possession of the Germans during World War I. Hitler’s version was said to have fallen into Stalin’s hands in 1945, and some believed that Communists were now updating it and using it.

In their book, Washington Confidential, published in 1951, Hearst reporters Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer threw all these ideas together in a highly inflammatory stew: 

The good people shook their heads in disbelief with the revelation that more than 90 twisted twerps in trousers had been swished out of the State Department. . . . . We pursued the subject and we found that there were at least 6,000 homosexuals on the government payroll, most of them known, and these comprise only a fraction of the total of their kind in the city. . . .

Now we have found out where the dull, dumb detectives go. . . . Nowhere else as surely as in the civil service. There, in the mediocrity and virtual anonymity of commonplace tasks, the sexes—all four of them—are equal in the robot requirements and qualifications. . . .

Foreign chancelleries, long ago learned that homos were of value in espionage work. The German Roehm, and later Goering, established divisions of such in the Foreign Office. That was aped by Soviet Russia, which has a flourishing desk now in Moscow. According to Congressman [A.L.] Miller [of Nebraska], who mad a comprehensive study of the subject, young students are indoctrinated and given a course in homosexuality, then taught to infiltrate in perverted circles in other countries. . . . Aware of the seriousness of the problem, the State Department has a highly hush-hush Homosexual Bureau, manned by trained investigators and former counter-espionage agents, whose duties are to ferret out pansies in Foggy Bottom.

The authors extrapolated from Kinsey’s figures to make the numbers of gays in government appear particularly menacing:

Dr. Kinsey wasn’t appalled by the 6,000 fags in government jobs. According to his calculations 56,787 Federal workers are congenital homosexuals. He includes 21 Congressmen and says 192 others are bad behavior risks.

Despite some initial interest in the subject, Senator McCarthy didn’t play a leading role in pervert-hunting. That was left t o his ally, Nebraska Senator Kenneth Wherry, the GOP floor leader. A licensed embalmer, Wherry was dubbed “the merry mortician.” He was famous fro his malapropisms—referring to Vietnam as “Indigo China” and the nation’s military leaders as “the Chief Joints of Staff” and prefacing his remarks with “It is my unanimous opinion.” Wherry made it his person crusade to remove homosexuals from all posts in government, sensitive and nonsensitive alike. Communists and homosexuals, homosexuals and Communists, they were all the same in Senator Wherry’s eyes. “You can hardly separate homosexuals from subversives,” he told New York Post columnist Max Lerner. “Mind you, I don’t say every homosexual is a subversive, and I don’t say every subversive is a homosexual. But al man of low morality is a menace in the government, whatever he is, and they are all tied together.”

With Wherry as cochair, when the Senate subcommittee investigating the “employment of homosexuals and other sex perverts in government” issued its recommendations in December 1950, the results proved no surprise. The subcommittee’s conclusion was unqualified: “Sex perverts,” were not “proper persons” to be employed by the U.S. government. A homosexual lacked “emotional stability,” according to the report, tending to have

a corrosive influence upon his fellow employees. These perverts will frequently attempt to entice normal individuals to engage in perverted practices. This is particularly true in the case of young and impressionable people who might come under the influence of a pervert. . . . One homosexual can pollute a Government office.

The committee also addressed the issue of security risk, always the major concern of the fifties: 

Most perverts tend to congregate at the same restaurants, night clubs, and bars, which places can be identified with comparative ease in any community, making it possible for a recruiting agent to develop clandestine relationships which can be used for espionage purposes. 

The campaign to remove homosexual in government was effective. According to historian John D’Emilio, from 1947 through April 1950, dismissals of homosexuals from civilian posts averaged fiver per month. But once the brouhaha about perverts in government began in the winter and spring of 1950, the numbers increased to more than sixty a month over the next year and a half. In April 1953, the newly elected president, Dwight David Eisenhower, issued Executive Order IO405, revising the loyalty-security program. Under the new policy, “sexual perversion” was sufficient and necessary grounds for exclusion from federal employment. In the first sixteen months of the Eisenhower directive, an average of forty homosexuals were ousted from government positions every month. (These figures do not reflect the number of job applicants who were not hired because of their homosexuality.) The civilian purge was reflected in the armed forces as well. In the late 1940s, the U.S. military was discharging homosexuals at the rate of about a thousand a year. By the early 1950s, the numbers had jumped to two thousand a year.

The FBI was responsible for supplying the Civil Service Commission with background information on employees and applicants for employment. As D’Emilio reports, regional FBI offices compiled lists of gay bars and gathering places and entered into contact with vice-squad officers who supplied arrest records on morals charges. The Post Office monitored recipients of physique magazines, the closest the fifties came to “gay porn.” Postal inspectors subscribed to gay pen pal clubs, corresponded with men who they believed to be homosexual, and put tracers on their mail in order to locate others. (Postal surveillance of magazines aimed at gay men continued until 1966, when Capital Hill investigators probing into government invasions of privacy uncovered the practice; Postmaster General Larry F. O’Brien the put a strop to it.)

The effects of gay witch-hunting—and the FBI’s role in it—can be seen in the experience of a man called B.D.H., who described his experiences in a statement to the American Civil Liberties Union. As D’Emilio recounts, B.D.H. had been expelled from the University of Illinois in 1942, apparently after making a pass at another student. he moved to Washington, where he worked for several years as a clerk-typist at a federal agency, and eventually returned to the Midwest. An FBI agent visited the University of Illinois and obtained his records. As a result, a friend of B.D.H.’s who worked for the State Department was charged with sexual perversion on the basis of his association with B.D.H. At three different jobs that B.D.H. held—two in St. Louis and one in Chicago—the FBI informed supervisors and coworkers of B.D.H.’s homosexuality. Fellow employees made his life miserable. In 1960, after an arm injury left him unable to type, he applied to the Illinois Division of Vocational Rehabilitation for job retraining. He was refused because of his sexual orientation. Even in the early 1960s, B.D.H. asserts that FBI agents visited him at his home to attempt to pressure him to reveal the names of homosexual acquaintances.

Panic about homosexuals in high places spread north to Canada, where the new 1952 immigration act explicitly barred homosexuals from entering the country. At the same time, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (the Mounties) established a special investigative unit called A-3 that concentrated exclusively on identifying and rooting out homosexuals in government jobs. Like their American counterparts, the A-3 investigators watched gay bars and public parks; they also recruited informers among gay men. The force soon had a list of three thousand names, according to Canadian journalist John Sawatsky, who investigated the Mounties’ Security Service for his book Men in the Shadows.

In one bizarre incident, Sawatsky writes, the A-3 unit attempted to plot groupings and gathering places of homosexuals on a map of the Canadian capital of Ottawa. Every area of the city with a concentration of homosexuals was identified and marked with a red dot. Soon, the map contained so many colored dots that it became an indecipherable mass of red ink. The investigators purchased another map—the largest one available. It, too, became on great red smudge. Finally, a Mountie approached the Department of National Defense with a request that it fly over the city with high-resolution cameras in order to produce an even larger map. The Defense Department refused—it was experiencing a financial crunch at the time. At that point, the mapping of Ottawa’s homosexuals came to an end.

Congressional hearings and investigations, New York Times headlines about “perverts,” a series of (sympathetic) columns in the New York Post by Max Lerner, all marked the first time that homosexuals had become a political issue in the United States. But in the polarized political climate of the McCarthy years, “queer-baiting” became a weapon to be used by both McCarthyites and their enemies. Ironically, it was the inordinate concern on the part of McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy M. Cohn, regarding the military server of McCarthy committee aid G. David Schine—a concern that may or may not have had a homosexual element to it—that was to precipitate the Army-McCarthy hearings that finally brought down the Washington senator.

Was McCarthy himself gay? There were certainly widespread rumors to that effect, despite the hard-drinking bachelor senator’s propensity for pawing women at parties. Drew Pearson, the syndicated columnist, who despised McCarthy, kept a file on the subject. In his diary entry of January 14, 1952, Pearson makes mention of a letter that a young Army lieutenant had written to Senator William Benton of Connecticut claiming that McCarthy had engaged in an act of sodomy with him after picking him up in a bar. But when the FBI interviewed the lieutenant, he denied everything, claiming that his letter had been planted by “another homo who was jealous.” None of Pearson’s information ever reached print, at a time when newspapers were far less inclined to publish information about private lives of high officials than they are today.

One newspaper publisher had no such compunction, however. He was Hank Greenspun, the publisher of the Las Vega Sun. A former press agent for a Las Vegas gambling house, Greenspun was a passionate McCarthy-hater. He had his reasons: McCarthy had once referred to Greenspun’s newspaper as “the local Daily Worker” and charged erroneously that Greenspun was an army deserter and ex-convict. In an October 25, 1952 article in the Sun, Greenspun minced no word. “Joe McCarthy is a bachelor of 43 years,” he noted. “He seldom dates girls and if he does he laughingly describes it as window dressing. It is common talk among homosexuals in Milwaukee who rendezvous at the White Horse Inn that Senator Joe McCarthy often engaged in homosexual activities. The persons in Nevada who listened to McCarthy’s radio talk thought he had the queerest laugh. He has. He is.” In another article, Greenspun wrote, “The Young Republicans held a state convention in Wausua, Wis., at which Sen. McCarthy was an honored guest. During the convention, McCarthy spent the night with William McMahon, formerly an official of the Milwaukee County Young Republicans, in a Eausua hotel room, at which time, McCarthy and McMahon engaged in illicit acts with each other.” It was widely believed that Greenspun’s “information” came from Drew Pearson’s files McCarthy contemplated suing Greenspun but never did so.

All the evidence about McCarthy’s alleged sexual proclivities remains circumstantial. Thomas C. Reeves, author of the most extensive biography of McCarhty, states flatly that the senator wasn’t gay. But McCarthy was clearly discomfited by the accusations. In September 1953, at the age of forty-five the Wisconsin senator married Jean Kerr, a member of his staff. But even marriage didn’t entirely dispel the talk.

If it is unclear whether or not McCarthy was gay, there is no doubt about Roy Marcus Cohn (1927-86), who became the chief counsel to McCarthy’s subcommittee in 1953 at the age of twenty-six. The son of a powerful Bronx judge, Cohn was a prodigy of sorts, with a steel-trap mind and photographic memory. He graduate from Columbia University Law School at nineteen and had to wait two years before he was eligible to take the bar exam. On the day he became a member of the bar, he was sworn in as Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He became a protégé of Irving Saypol, the U.S. Attorney, and helped send U.S. Communist leaders to prison in the Smith Act prosecution. At the spy trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, he conducted the government’s examination of David Greenglass, Ethel’s brother, who had turned state’s evidence. Cohn’s anticommunism seems to have been genuine. He was obsessed with proving, especially in the light of the Rosenberg case, that Jews were loyal and patriotic Americans.

Cohn made useful friends outside legal circles. While assistant U.S. attorney, he leaked information on virtually a daily basis to the nation’s leading gossip columnist, Walter Winchell. In exchange, Cohn was invited to sit at Winchell’s table at the Stork Club. Sometime in 1951, he met George Sokolsky, the fiercely anti-Communist Hearst newspaper columnist who became his mentor. More than anyone, Sokolsky was responsible for Cohn going to Washington.

In 1953, Cohn prevailed over Robert F. Kennedy to become the McCarthy investigatory committee’s chief counsel. Cohn brought along his friend and night-clubbing companion, G. David Schine, as “Chief Consultant” to the committee. Within a few months, the two young men were running the show. Heir to a hotel fortune, the twenty-six-year-old Schine was “a good-looking young man in the sallow, sleekly coiffed, and somnolent-eyed style that one used to associate with male orchestra singers,” writes Richard H. Rovere. In fact, at one time he had been a press agent for the Vaughn Monroe orchestra and had published two or three ballads of his own, on of which was called “Please Say Yes or It’s Goodbye.” As an undergraduate at Harvard, Schine was known for living in a high style that featured an exquisitely furnished room, a valet, and a large black convertible equipped with a two-way telephone. Schine’s anti-Communist credentials rested on a six-page pamphlet called “Definition of Communism,” which along with the Gideon Bible, was placed in every room of the Schine hotel chain.

Cohn and Schine were “a study in contrasts,” notes David M. Oshinsky in his book A Conspiracy So Immense. “Cohn was short, dark, intense, and abrasive; Schine was tall, fair, frivolous, and complacent.” According to some observers, it was Schine who was the dominant influence. Despite Cohn’s intellectual brilliance, Schine was fond of humiliating Cohn in front of strangers and acting as if Cohn was his inferior.

In April 1953, Cohn and Schine set off for Europe, ostensibly to investigate U.S.-run libraries to make sure that no left-wing literature was hiding out on their shelves. The trip was a fiasco that turned up nothing, infuriated virtually every American embassy in Western Europe, and turned the two investigators into laughing-stocks. (In one incident, Schine supposedly chased Cohn through a hotel lobby, swatting him over the head with a magazine.) Upon their arrival at a particular hotel, Cohn and Schine would ask for adjoining rooms but insist on separate accommodations, explaining, “You see, we don’t work for the State Department!” The joke seems to have been primarily for the benefit of a retinue of journalists who recorded their every move; hotel reservations clerks in Rome or Vienna were unlikely to have heard very much about accusations that the U.S. State Department was a haven for homosexuals.

Nicholas von Hoffman, one of Cohn’s biographers, reports that people who saw Cohen and Schine close up doubted that they were lovers or that Schine was gay. People who observed them at a distance assumed they were just two playboys. Cohn, in private conversation with friends, denied any intimate involvement with Schine. In any event, Cohn was deep in the closet. He was dating women and spending more time at the Stork Club than in Washington’s gay bars. For years, he would deny that he was gay, telling journalist Ken Auletta in an interview in the 1970s, “Anyone who knows me and knows anything about the way I function . . . would have an awfully hard time reconciling, ah, ah, reconciling, that with ah, ah, any kind of homosexuality. Every facet of my personality, of my, ah, aggressiveness, of my toughness, of everything along those lines, is just totally, I suppose, incompatible, with anything like that.” As Hoffman notes, Cohn’s “embarrassed, thick-tongued denial of his sexuality” took place at a time when even high-school students had come to realize that most gay men were anything but “limp-wristed, lavender lads.” Cohn’s view of what constituted a gay man remained mired in stereotypical notions of the fifties. At the time of his well-publicized death from AIDS in 1986, newspapers did not hesitate to write about his homosexuality.

During Cohn’s eighteen-month period of service to Senator McCarthy, the young counsel apparently had no compunction about using allegations of other people’s homosexuality to destroy them. Whether this was an effort to hide his own homosexuality through cruelty to others, or an expression of gay self-hatred, or his own defiant pride in his own toughness and aggressiveness, or some combination of all three, is anyone’s guess. The first case concerned Samuel Reber, the Acting High Commissioner in Germany. Cohn was convinced that Reber had deliberately trapped him and Schine into a news conference at a stop in Bonn during their European junket, in order to make them look ridiculous. According to von Hoffman’s sources, the McCarthy people had dug up a story about a homosexual relationship that Reber had supposedly been involved in as an undergraduate at Harvard years before. They threatened Reber with its revelation. Reber resigned from the State Department.

Then there was the case of Senator Lester Hunt, a Wyoming Democrat. An opponent of McCarthy, Hunt was up for reelection the following November to a Senate that was split down the middle between Democrats and Republicans. Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, a friend and political ally of Cohn, had a talk with Hunt. Unless Hunt withdrew from the race for reelection in November, Bridges reportedly told him, everyone in Wyoming would find out that Hunt’s son had been arrested the previous October for soliciting a D.C. plainclothes policeman for “lewd and immoral purposes.” Hunt withdrew from the race. Eleven days later, he shot himself to death in his Senate office.

Cohn’s connection to the Hunt affair is somewhat murky. But as von Hoffman notes: 

The modus operandi was the same as that used against Samuel Reber. Hunt had been a quiet, persistent but rational foe of McCarthy’s; as to Roy’s relationship with [Senator] Bridges, a congressman who knew Roy well remembered that “Roy used to drop Bridges name left and right. There was no question at all they were extremely tight. He could get him on the phone any time he wanted him; he’d brag about different things that Bridges would do. There were very, very close.” 

But Cohn and McCarthy soon received their comeuppance. Two months after Cohn and Schine returned from their European junket, David Schine received his draft notice. Cohn tried unsuccessfully to persuade the army to exempt Schine; when this failed, he pressured the army to grant Private Schine a commission and to assign him to some sort of duty with McCarthy’s committee. McCarthy, perhaps reluctantly, went along with him. The army resisted. Military officials released a blistering report accusing McCarthy and Cohn of trying to blackmail them with threats of anti-Communist probes unless the army gave preferential treatment to Private Schine. For their part, McCarthy and Cohn claimed the army was trying to blackmail them, using Schine as a “hostage” to pressure the committee to turn a blind eye to accusations of communism in the armed forces. The result of all this was the Senate investigation of the charges and counter-charges—known as the Army-McCarthy hearings—an investigation that would discredit McCarthy and Cohn forever. “It was Cohn’s loyalty to Schine and McCarthy’s to Cohn that led to decline and eventual fall,” notes Rovere. Was it Cohn’s loyalty to Schine that caused him to overreach? Or was it love? Infatuation? Or just blind rage and determination to assert his power over the U.S. Army? Roy Cohn was a complicated man.

The Army-McCarthy hearings of the spring of 1954 were on of the most extraordinary events in modern American history, largely because they were televised. The hearings ran for thirty-five days; twenty million Americans were estimated to have watched them. For the first time, the new medium of television brought political spectacle into American living rooms, and it gripped the nation. The hearings also featured some nasty gay-baiting, primarily aimed at Roy Cohn.

The gay-baiting began outside the hearing room when Senator Ralph Flanders, a Vermont Republican and foe of McCarthy, demanded in a speech on the Senate floor that the hearing get to the “real heart” of the matter. To Flanders that meant the “mystery concerning the personal relationships of the army private, the staff assistant, and the senator. There is a relationship of the staff assistant to the senator. There is a relationship of the staff assistant to the army private. It is natural that he should wish to retain the services of an able collaborator, but he seems to have an almost passionate anxiety to retain him. Why? And then there is the senator himself. Does the staff assistant have some hold on the senator? . . . . Does the committee plan to investigate the real issues at stake?”

Members of the committee were also interested in this “almost passionate anxiety” to retain Private Schine. Here was the scene in the hearing room when Roy Cohn took the witness stand: 

SEN. JOHN McCLELLAN (D-Arkansas): First, I will ask you if you have any special interest in Mr. Schine?

ROY COHN: I don’t know what you mean by “special interest.” He is a friend of mine.

McCLELLAN: I mean in friendship or anything else which would bind you to him closer than to the ordinary friend.

COHN: Nothing. He is one of a number of very good friends whom I have. I am fortunate to have a large number.

McClellan’s attempt to pin down Cohn proved unsuccessful, but the subject of Cohn’s sexual proclivities soon emerged in another way that was far more damaging. This occurred when the hearings became transfixed by the celebrated case of a cropped photo. The photograph in question, introduced into evidence by the McCarthy side, pictured Private G. David Schine posing with Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens at an air force base. The purpose of producing the photograph was to show the secretary being friendly and considerate to Private Schine, demonstrating that there had been no attempt on McCarthy or Cohn’s part to blackmail the army. But the following day, Joseph Welch, the genteel, bow-tied Boston lawyer who represented the army, produced an enlargement of the same photo, which showed Stevens and Schine but also included Air Force Colonel Jack T. Bradley, to say nothing of the sleeve of yet another individual. The photo had been “altered, shamefully cut down,” in order to give a deceptive impression of chumminess, insisted an outraged Welch, proof that McCarthy and Cohn could not be trusted. After a series of denials by McCarthy aides as to who was responsible for the cropping, Welch faced down James N. Juliana, a former FBI agent who worked for McCarthy: 

WELCH: I find myself so puzzled to know why you just did not take a photostat of the picture that was delivered to you that afternoon and hand it over to Mr. [Ray] Jenkins [counsel for the committee]. Would you tell us how come you did not do this?

JULIANA: I just mentioned or just stated that I was under instructions to furnish a picture of only the two individuals.

WELCH: And who gave you these instructions?

JULIANA: Jenkins and—or Cohn.

WELCH: Did you think this came from a pixie? Where did you think that this picture I hold in my hand came from?

JULIANA: I have no idea.

McCARTHY (interrupting): Will counsel for my benefit define—I think he might well be an expert on it—what a pixie is?

WELCH: Yes, I should say, Mr. Senator, that a pixie is a close relative of a fairy. Shall I proceed, sir? Have I enlightened you?

The hearing room broke up in laughter. McCarthy forced a smile. Cohn tried his best to hide any expression at all. Cohn later called Welch’s parry “malicious,” “wicked,” and “indecent.” But he had been humiliated.

In the end, the Republican and Democratic committee members offered differing reports on the hearings. But McCarthy and Cohn had seemed embattled throughout and thoroughly outclassed by Welch. For the first time, senators had openly denounced McCarthy. McCarthy still retained intact at least some of his ability to inspire fear in his enemies, but Cohn had clearly outlived his usefulness. Part of his undoing had been his bullying tactics toward the army, but more than that, he had been an easy target for the kind of gay-baiting he himself practiced. He resigned his subcommittee post and returned to New York to practice law.

On December 2, 1954, the U.S. Senate voted by a vote of sixty-seven to twenty-two to censure Senator McCarthy. Two years later he was dead. But the fear and paranoia McCarthy and his minions inspired took longer to die.

Roy Cohn can be seen as an exemplar of the homophobia of the 1950s turned inward—and outward—with destructive force and malice. But the panicky search for “perverts” in the McCarthy era went far beyond a few homosexuals in high posts at the State Department. In a culture that was largely hostile toward and ignorant about homosexuality, dire warnings about perverts in Washington helped create an atmosphere of persecution and purge nationwide. In the nation’s capital itself, arrests of gay men numbered one thousand a year in the 1950s, with D.C. police entrapping men in Lafayette Park and downtown movie houses. In Philadelphia, during the 1950s, misdemeanor charges against gay men and lesbians numbered one hundred a month. In Baltimore, in October 1955, 162 men were arrested in a police raid on a gay bar called Pepper Hill Club; twenty-four trips by police cars and paddy wagons were required to bring all the patrons to police headquarters. And in San Francisco, thirty-six women went to jail in September 1956 when the police raided the Alamo Club, a lesbian bar. Raids on gay bars were commonplace in many cities, and those arrested often found their names and addresses printed in the newspaper the next day. A survey conducted by Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research found that 20 percent of male homosexuals surveyed had had trouble with the police.

Starting in 1955, a Florida legislative committee headed by one-time governor and state senator Charley Johns conducted a nine-year investigation into suspected Communists, civil rights leaders, and homosexuals, particularly in academia and public education. As a result of the probe, more than one hundred teachers lost their jobs; students dropped out of college before earning their degrees. Records of the committee, released in 1993, indicated that individuals became targets of investigation because they were seen near suspected gay haunts, including a courthouse rest room, a university library, and a bus station. Many of the interrogations took place behind closed doors in hotel rooms. A state senator at the time who was not a member of the committee said that people targeted by the committee “were scared to death. It was the most insidious form of invasion of a person’s privacy.”

In was in more obscure parts of the country that some of the most grievous incidents of antigay persecution took place. In Boise, Idaho, in November 1955, the arrest of three men on charges of sexual activity with teenage boys precipitated a massive witch-hunt documented in John Gerassi’s book The Boys of Boise. An editorial in the daily Idaho Statesman, entitled “Crush the Monster,” helped provoke the panic. “It seems almost incredible that any such cancerous growth could have taken root and developed in our midst,” the newspaper wrote. “The situation is one that causes general alarm and calls for immediate and systematic cauterization.” Revealingly, the person brought in by Boise officials to perform the “cauterization” was an investigator who had worked purging homosexuals in the State Department. Over a fifteen-month period, some 1,472 men were brought in for questioning, sixteen were charged (several were sentenced to long prison terms), and larger numbers of gay men fled the Idaho capital.

In a less well-known incident, in Sioux City, Iowa, some twenty-nine men were committed to a mental hospital in November 1955 after the unsolved kidnapping-murder of a young boy. The men were locked up on charges of morals offenses or “conspiracy to commit morals offenses” under a new Iowa law whose terminology made little distinction between “criminal sexual psychopaths” and homosexuals. The county attorney, Dan O’Brien, was quoted as saying, “Word is out they’re not welcome in Sioux City anymore.” Dr. W.B. Brown, the state hospital superintendent, criticized the law and the incarcerations, however, complaining of a lack of facilities. He added, “There is no specific cure or treatment for that condition. . . . The law requires me to report to the court once a year. What can I say? I can’t say they are cured.”

The hospital superintendent’s misgivings were shared by One magazine, the publication closely associated with the Mattachine Society, the early homosexual rights organization. “Will homosexual acts now cease to occur among Iowa’s 2,700,000?” One asked. “Hardly. Nor do officials like O’Brien, or the ex-mayor of Miami, or anyone else, have the right to say homosexuals are ‘not welcome’ in a community. [Twenty-nine] scapegoats placed, till cure, with a doctor who can’t cure them. Is this due process? Can every Iowan who has committed an ‘unusual’ sex act, or who might be accused of having a ‘mental disorder’ now be held indefinitely without specific chargers or trial?”

Given the forces arrayed against them, there were few ways that gays and lesbians could defend themselves through established channels. Even the American Civil Liberties Union was unwilling to come to their defense. In January 1957 the ACLU board of directors adopted a national policy statement upholding the constitutionality of state sodomy laws, as well as federal security statutes banning the employment of gay men and women. “It is not within the province of the Union [the ACLU] to evaluate the social validity of the laws aimed at the suppression or elimination of homosexuals,” the board of directors affirmed.

It was clearly up to gay and lesbians themselves to fight for their own interests. No one else would do so. In the midst of the relentless drumbeat about “perverts,” of government purges and bar raids and police entrapments, the earliest U.S. gay organizations of any consequence—the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis—made their cautious appearance. Homosexuals, rarely characterized by a sense of solidarity, began to organize against common oppression. In the witch-hunting atmosphere, a feeling was emerging that something had to be done.

· Neil Miller, Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.