How a fur-lined hood demolished McCarthy’s career

A quick note—apparently political moments during the Cold War were just as SNL-worthy as they are today. I laughed thinking about an army professional, in all seriousness, condemning G. David Schine for wearing a “fur-lined hood,” as well as mittens (Friedman 1118). My title is a humorous exaggeration, but seriously, sometimes the common person just has to shake their head at what a bunch of men in power were riled up about.

The “Lavender Scare” was an era of homophobia during the Cold War in which people questioned the sexuality of their fellow Americans in a critical and unaccepting way. In the postwar years, gay communities established a more perceptible presence in society than previous, resulting in antihomosexuals becoming overwhelmed by a heightened irrational fear. During the Lavender Scare, any deviation from a stereotypical masculine persona or close relationships between men were grounds for the assumption that someone might secretly be a homosexual. The Lavender Scare and the Red Scare, the fear that anyone could be a secret communist working for the USSR, coincided in a completely predictable way, according to Andrew Friedman, author of The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip, and Cold War Politics. In her journal, Friedman shows how the smear campaign of senator Joseph McCarthy reveals connections in the way people were just as fearful of homosexuals as they were of communists, and for similar reasons. The supposed characteristics that many communists possessed were shared by veiled homosexuals during the Cold War. In illustrating these parallels, Friedman writes that homosexuals and communists were guilty of “moral corruption, psychological immaturity, and an ability to ‘pass’ undetected among ordinary Americans. More fundamentally, communists and homosexuals were linked through the trope of enslavement: homosexuals were slaves to their passions for other men, communists to their Soviet masters” (Friedman 1106). Whether an individual was communist or homosexual, government officials were ready to deem them as wholly unfit to have any sort of power or responsibility within the government. While a practicing communist wouldn’t realistically work as a cog in the wheel of democracy, there is nothing wrong with a member of the LGBTQIA+ community serving their country and being a “patriot,” which Joseph McCarthy was not seen as capable of doing as a potential homosexual. While I can at least understand why people were afraid of communism upending our democracy, I cannot form a seemingly rational explanation for why people living during the cold war would have had reason to distrust a gay senator. Sexual identity does not influence whether or not someone is fit for office. While the Red Scare may have been substantiated, I feel brave enough at this moment to argue that the Lavender Scare was simply rooted in homophobia, nothing else. I’m not Joseph McCarthy’s #1 fan. I wouldn’t say I’m a fan whatsoever. However, I believe his demise was because his colleagues were either a) homophobic enough to write off every other characteristic he possessed or b) wanted to disarm him so badly that they knew ‘putting him in the closet and taking him back out’ would turn the people against him (Friedman 1123).

Sexual innuendos are definitely still used in politics today. An example being the stickers of Elon Musk wearing a pink pantsuit or dress captioned “First Lady.” The use of the color pink, the dress, the title—these symbols are contributing to this allegation that something more, something intimate, is happening between Trump and Musk. I do think this specific innuendo is used a bit differently than the one against McCarthy. Whereas the smear campaign of McCarthy was sufficient to ruin his career, First Lady Musk is just a joke. Of course, people have problems with the relationship between Musk and Trump, but I don’t think the core underlying concern is that they’re potentially homosexuals.