Austin Pitts:From Heroes to Villains: The Lives of Gay Federal Employees, 1947-1956
Channel: GIRES-Global Research Institute
Date: 2021-08-09

Austin J. Pitts is a Juris Doctor Candidate at the University of Iowa College of Law from Tallahassee, Florida. An aspiring legal historian, he studies how various Christian and Islamic legal systems regulate religious and sexual minorities. His papers have explored a wide range of subjects in American and Ottoman constitutional law.
Pitts completed his MA in religious studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2019. In 2017, he received a BA in international affairs and religion and a BS in economics from Florida State University.

ABSTRACT
Following World War II, the United States experienced widespread fear that national and foreign communists were infiltrating and subverting U.S. society and government. In April 1953, President Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450, which entrusted the heads of federal agencies to investigate their employees to determine whether they posed national security risks. The order prohibited thousands of gay applicants from federal employment and resulted in the termination of over five thousand federal employees due to suspicions regarding their sexuality. This amount far outweighs the number of Communists fired during the same period. Later, however, the United States Supreme Court restricted the application of Order 10450 in Cole v. Young (1956).
The topic of this paper addresses an understudied and essential issue in the legal history of the American LGBTQ community. Despite a growing body of literature on the Gay Liberation Movement (late 1960s through the mid-1980s), scholars typically overlook the period between 1947 and 1956. This paper looks at how Americans used religious argumentation to assert the moral corruptibility of homosexuals and the various laws and programs implemented that targeted gay federal employees. This paper will show how the legal system of this period impacted the daily lives of gay Americans and ultimately motivated the activism of the Gay Liberation Movement. This study examines executive orders, federal programs, legal rulings, and personal testimonies to construct a narrative of the experiences of gay men and women during the Second Red Scare.


CONFERENCE INFORMATION
"Religion and Politics in the United States"
Organizer: GIRES-Global Institute for Research Education & Scholarship  
Date: 17-18 July 2021
Place: Amsterdam (Virtual)
More information: https://www.gires.org/activities/conferences/religion-and-politics-in-the-united-states/