You hear some folks bellyache about those "Gay Studies" curriculums in various colleges and universities.  If they’re not complaining that they’re utterly worthless exercises in pointless "diversity", they’re insinuating that the courses couldn’t be about anything but how to have gay sex. 

I’ve never gone through one of these curriculums myself, but if the vast treasure trove of gay history that’s out there is any measure, a Gay Studies course isn’t just a nice idea for promoting diversity, it’s an important part of the human story.  Particularly here in America, where gay citizens have been a punching bag, a handy scarecrow, for every hysteria that’s ever swept through the country.  Case in point, the red scare of the 1950s.

I’m only part way into David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare, and already its challenging some of my bedrock views of what happened to my country during the so-called McCarthy era.  Far from being merely a sideshow to the communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the purges of gay Americans were central to it.  And…surprise, surprise, the engine for it all was republican hunger for political power.

Right at the beginning of the book, Johnson describes, using newspaper accounts of the time, interviews, and newly declassified documents, how the republicans in the late 1940s, out of power since Hoover brought on the great depression, saw the issue of homosexuals in government as a useful weapon against the party in power. 

They orchestrated a hearing in which they pressed the secretary of state for information about communists in the state department.  But it was a game of tag.  In the process of defending themselves against the republican charge that they had allowed communists to get and hold jobs in the state department, the democrats described how they were diligently ferreting out "security risks".  Far from being lax said the democrats, they’d uncovered and removed 91 "security risks" from the state department.

Which gave the republicans an opening to press them for details.  How many of those were communists?  It was a question the republicans already knew the answer to, because they’d had all the details in a closed door hearing previously.  What they wanted was to get it out in the open.  And the democrats, backed into a corner and not wanting to leave it hanging out there that they’d let so many communists into the state department when they hadn’t actually, said, that in fact none of them were communists, nobody had been let go from the state department for disloyalty.  The 91 people fired were not accused of being traitors.  Just…you know…security risks.  Pressed further they admitted that these people had all been fired because they were homosexuals.

That was what the republicans wanted to hear, and get into the papers.  Not a communist threat, but a lavender one.  Why?  Because it was felt that the moral issue played even better against the democrat’s base…working class and poor Americans, then the communist threat did.  In other words, it made a great wedge issue against the democrats.  And right from the beginning, when Joe McCarthy began waving around his baseless claims of a vast communist conspiracy lurking in the federal government, some republicans…even in his own state…were counseling him to downplay the communist thing and play up the morals charges more, because for one thing they actually were finding homosexuals working in government agencies, but mostly because it made the voters in the democrat’s base even angrier.

McCarthy of course, didn’t take that advise.  He pressed on with his communist bogyman and the question echoed in the committee chambers of capital hill, are you now, or have you ever been a communist?  But while McCarthy was busy stirring up the Communist Menace and getting headlines, the republican party was busy stirring up the Homosexual Menace and a great purge began which…ironically…led to the formation of the first gay rights groups as gay people began to get tired of being kicked around and started pushing back.

Later, during the black civil rights movement, the republicans would go on to exploit white working class racial fears against the democrats in exactly the same way.  But here, even as far back as the late 1940s, you can see them using the Homosexual Menace as a tool to divide and weaken the democrats.  Because accusing the democrats of tolerating homosexuality worked even better then nearly anything else the republicans could throw at them…even communism.  And it wouldn’t stop working, until we gay Americans, having had enough of it, took to the streets in defense of our lives.

You want to know why it’s so damn important that we make a big deal out of our sexual orientation?  Why we don’t just quietly "leave it in the bedroom where it belongs"…?  This is why.  Because our lives were turned into cannon fodder for the power dreams of politicians and that needs to stop.  This country needs to look…really look…at the character of those loud voices bearing moral crusades, waving around scarecrows that have their neighbor’s faces on them.

The moral rot that is on plain view every night on Fox News and in the many health care "town halls" going on all across the country…in the "birthers" and the "deathers"…it isn’t new.  Not at all.  What’s different now is the gutter that all those country club republicans began playing to back in the Truman years has taken over, and they have their own voice now in the national news media.  And you need to understand this: those country club republicans would be fine, even with that, if it could keep them in power.

Perhaps you could see this just as clearly from looking at the history of race relations in America, and republican party race baiting.  But the history of the struggle of gay Americans for equality and justice is American history too, and you really see what the republican crusade for "morality" and "family values" is made of when you study it.

[Edited a tad…]