The Lavender Scare and the Empire: Rethinking Cold War Antigay Politics

This article argues that "the lavender scare reflected not only a struggle on who would control the [American] empire, but also disquiet about the state of the empire, its 'civilization.' Grounded in a developmental notion of history, Americans' attempts to define their world-historic epoch also fed into the postwar fears of moral decline that other scholars have noted. The agitation about potentially traitorous gays, moreover, derived also from efforts to distinguish American civilization or modernity not only from the Soviets, but also from the 'masses' of the decolonizing world." [From the Article]