A trove of previously buried documents tells the story of how anti-LGBTQ surveillance targeted queer people in the United States—and how those people pushed back.
Astory of queer liberation is concealed in a dystopian-looking crypt in Washington, D.C. You can’t find it under the gilded ceiling and marble columns of the Library of Congress’s Jefferson Building. Instead, you have to enter the mammoth, rectangular Madison Building next door. The harsh lights and linoleum floors make it feel morguelike. In its windowless manuscripts room, uniformed archivists slowly wheel out boxes of documents from the depths of the building.
Only in this austere setting can you begin to understand the sheer magnitude of the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in America, which resulted from the Lavender Scare, the government’s systematic persecution of “sexually deviant” federal employees in the 1950s and 1960s. Thousands of American citizens lost their jobs because the government learned they were “perverts,” morally inferior, and therefore susceptible to blackmail by Communists. But a decade before the June 1969 uprising against police harassment led by trans and gender nonconforming bar patrons that became known as the Stonewall Riots, one disgraced federal employee fought back.