Don’t Ask, Don’t Ask
Artists, particularly in theater, are still plagued by the slur "Gay Commie Jew." But how did it come about? by Allen Ellenzweig, 2012
… To some extent, the status that five Jewish American gay men enjoyed within the arts provided them a kind of cover that rank-and-file gay men and lesbians could barely hope to find. The so-called Lavender Scare of the 1950s was as lethal as the Red Scare, with thousands of civil servants, uniformed service members, and teachers across the country fired from their jobs on the presumption that “perverts”—to use a period term—were national security risks or engaged in moral turpitude. In 1950, the head of the Republican National Committee warned his party that “as dangerous as the actual Communists are the sexual perverts who have infiltrated our Government in recent years.” According to Sherry, “[A]gitation about queers in the arts … intensified in the late 1940s and 1950s amid the Lavender Scare.”
And just as the Red Scare had its bogeymen—the defunct “Comintern,” the Soviet-sponsored Communist International with national representations from around the globe—the Lavender Scare had an equivalent coinage: the “Homintern.” This waggish pun is variously attributed to poet W.H. Auden or other English literati who originally used it in the 1930s to evoke a clandestine link among artist-homosexuals, even if the intention was to mock claims of conspiratorial power. The term could cut both ways—an epithet for those who believed in a gay cabal undermining the Free World or a “camp” jeu de mots that queers might use with irony.
Meanwhile, if the McCarthy-era witch hunts targeted a large number of Jews—who in previous decades made the mistake of being “prematurely” anti-fascist, or signed petitions organized by so-called Communist front or “subversive” organizations, or been too enthusiastic in union organizing—it was not for nothing that Hollywood found itself in the crosshairs. In Victor Navasky’s Naming Names, one commentator claims that the source of “animus against Hollywood” by one of the House Committee’s influential early members, Congressman John Rankin from Mississippi, was “the large number of Jews eminent in the film industry. … In Rankin’s mind, to call a Jew a Communist was a tautology. … He took glee in baiting his Jewish colleagues.” A lawyer for the Anti-Defamation League remembered that “Jews in that period were automatically suspect. … People felt if you scratch a Jew, you can find a Communist.”
The suspicion that gays exerted a similarly malign influence on America produced paranoia in the tabloid press and mass-market magazines, and even in respected political journals, belying today’s popular notion that nobody spoke about homosexuality in the 1950s.
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Photo Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins, and Leonard Bernstein being photographed during rehearsal for West Side Story, 1957. [Friedman-Abeles/The New York Public Library]
