The Lavender Scare, which we can locate historically in the period from the World War II era into the first decades of the Cold War, is a decades-long attempt by politicians and political officials to purge the federal government in the military and in other kinds of federal employment of homosexuals, of gay and lesbian people
was a moral panic during the mid-20th century about homosexual people in the United States government and their mass dismissal from government service. It contributed to and paralleled the anti-communist campaign known as McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare
