And while American students might learn more about the Red Scare or study McCarthyism in school, Johnson says that without learning about the Lavender Scare, they’re only hearing part of the story. Joseph McCarthy’s fear-mongering “Red Scare” campaign in the early 1950s, which targeted alleged subversive communists working in the federal government, thousands of government employees were forced out of their jobs as a result of the anti-gay policy. According to him, this aspect of American history has largely been overlooked. Known as the “ Lavender Scare,” the policy was based on the unfounded fear that gay men and lesbians “posed a threat to national security because they were vulnerable to blackmail and were considered to have weak moral characters,” says historian David K. Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, the investigation, interrogation and systematic removal of gay men and lesbians from the federal government became policy. What happened to Shoemaker in 1980 was the continuation of a policy launched nearly 30 years earlier, in 1953.