The recent revelation that the U.S. military is spying on gay-rights groups, say historians, evokes the Cold War crackdowns on gays during the McCarthy era. Then, as now, the government compiled lists of American citizens who were suspected of subversive activity by virtue of their association with critics of government policy. Targets included gays and members of gay or gay-friendly groups.
The Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military issued a press release attacking the news.
NBC News recently reported it had obtained sections of a secret Pentagon database with information about individuals linked to peaceful activist and protest groups that opposed certain U.S. military actions. According to the Advocate, the military has been monitoring meetings and events it deems ‘suspicious,’ including gatherings of several student groups at the University of California, New York University and William Patterson College. Students were meeting to discuss and oppose the military’s policy excluding openly gay Americans from serving in uniform. At least one protest was classified as ‘possibly violent.’
A spokesman for the Defense Department said the Pentagon has ‘a legitimate interest’ in using personal information about private citizens to ‘protect its installations and people.’
But according to David K. Johnson, a historian at University of South Florida and author of The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government, the banner of ‘national security’ has long been used as a pretext to crack down on gay rights and even to spark moral crusades against homosexuality under the guise of national defense.
His book explains that ‘security risk’ was used throughout the Cold War to invoke ‘the specter of homosexuality,’ which was cast as a threat to national security, and as something that ‘needed to be systematically removed’ from the government and minimized in the culture at large. As far as is known, the current surveillance does not target homosexuality itself, but rather gay groups which have voiced opposition to the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy barring openly gay service.