The Lavender Scare inspires pride for Pride

REVIEW by Drew Rowsome

9 Jun 2019

In my lifetime we have gone from a Pride Day protest to a Pride Week festival to a Pride Month celebration and marketing tool. We pay lip service to the past, to times when it was it was more difficult, punishable, to be gay. When openly gay was virtually unheard of. And we pat ourselves on the back for living in a part of the world that if not exactly gay-positive, is gay-friendly. And then I watched The Lavender Scare and one particular scene resonated terrifyingly.

In the 1950s, the US government organized a purge of gay and lesbian, LGBTQ was not yet an umbrella, employees. The ostensible reason was, despite there not being a single example on record, that gay people were, tying into the communist menace mania, susceptible to blackmail. The underlying reason was the blanket assumption that same-sex sex was immoral. Over 5,000 government employees were fired for being gay or just for being suspected of being gay.

The Lavender Scare features stills and footage of the politicians voting the purge into law. It is a sea of white, elderly, bitter-looking men. It is, if it were in colour, eerily similar to the current lawmakers we see questioning Dr Christie Blasey Ford, defending Trump, and rising in trained seal ovations for Ford. The same rabid fear of losing their privilege, the same perverse blood lust in their eyes. The past is not safely in the past.

The facts and history that The Lavender Scare presents is horrifying in itself, but it is the interviews with the survivors of the purge that are extraordinary. Joan Cassidy, whose stellar career in the navy was derailed, is close to tears; Carl Rizzi, a defiant drag queen, kept his job at the post office only by intervention from his supervisor and sheer gay gutsiness. Others fared worse, the family of Drew Ference is interviewed and the demise of a truly beloved and beautiful man is heartbreaking. Ference's oblique letters home are read movingly by TR Knight, and Cynthia Nixon, accompanied by film noir animation worthy of Saul Bass, recreates the horror of an interview by the FBI endured by Madeleine Tress. 

These people were not supplied with legal representation or able to offer a defense. They were just fired because investigations had uncovered that they might be gay. Or they had consorted with people who might be gay. Or an anonymous informant had labelled them gay. Until the astronomer Dr Franklin E Kameny was fired. And refused to go quietly and without fighting back. The young Kameny's many letters to many branches of government and to his family, are read stirringly by David Hyde Pierce. And Kameny himself is interviewed. He is a delightful curmudgeon. And a true hero. The world, and NASA, lost a brilliant man but gay rights gained a champion.

Kameny, who at first spurned the then nascent Mattachine Society because they were "too apologetic," helped reframe gay from a moral issue to a civil rights issue. We owe him a lot. There is a hilarious, heartbreaking scene discussing the dress code for the very first picket line for gay rights that, again we haven't learned from history, echoes the Pride debacles that urge hiding away the drag queens, the leather folk and the TNTMEN. I'm embarrassed to admit that Kameny was new to me other than as a vague one among a conceptual many forefathers. He is now a role model.

Narrated by Glenn Close's dulcet tones, The Lavender Scare places gay history and US  history into context, and then gives it faces that are unforgettable. Director Josh Howard seamlessly weaves together propaganda films (an excerpt from the camp classic but sadly real Boys Beware), documentary footage, still photographs, newspaper clippings, government forms, and the priceless interviews, to build to a devastating and cathartic climax. The Canadian government has finally apologized for similar, but in that Canadian way, less histrionic, actions in our past. Our recent past. The US laws forbidding homosexuals from receiving security clearances were not repealed until Bill Clinton signed an executive order in 1995.

1995. 

The Stonewall riots were inspired by a police raid. The Bathhouse Riots were inspired by a police raid. But the first organized homosexual rights protests, a picket line composed of a handful of very brave people, were inspired in part by the government purge. By the insidious actions of politicians, religious leaders and so-called moral guardians.Those are still around and we have to be prepared to stand up to the stealthy as well as the blatant. To be a Frank Kameny. To remember that Pride is still a march and not just a parade. The Lavender Scare is inspiring.