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During the Cold War, Congress and the president strengthened prohibitions on federal employment of gay men and lesbians, whom they deemed to be risks to national security. The Civil Service Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation developed bureaucratic procedures to prevent the hiring of homosexual applicants and to fire homosexual civil servants. The ban was not fully lifted until the early 1970s as a result of court rulings that, to justify dismissal, the bureaucracy needed to demonstrate a rational nexus between an employee's homosexual conduct and "the efficiency of the service. " Since 1980, the Office of Personnel Management has prohibited discrimination in the personnel process on the basis of sexual orientation. Several federal agencies now explicitly prohibit discrimination against gay and lesbian employees, but legal protections for them remain weak. This article traces the history of federal policy toward gay and lesbian employees since World War II, examining the impact of electoral politics, the bureaucracy, the courts, and the gay movement.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, September 4, 1993.
Although the military's ban on lesbians and gays has generated considerable political controversy, many people remain unaware that the federal government also prohibited the employment of gays in the civil service until 1975. This article provides a brief history of the political, bureaucratic, and judicial forces involved in the creation, implementation, and elimination of that prohibition. Though the policy apparently stretches back to the early days of the Republic, its importance exploded in the Cold War hysteria of the 1950s, when "sex perverts" in government erupted as a public policy issue that merged concerns about national security and moral purity. Under pressure from Congress, the U.S. Civil Service Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) developed techniques to purge lesbians and gay men from the civil service. These bureaucratic efforts persisted long after the political issue had died down. The courts slowly undercut the government's blanket exclusion of homosexuals from federal employment, eventually demanding that the bureaucracy demonstrate a rational connection between homosexual conduct and the efficiency of the service. Although the Civil Service Commission resisted employing homosexuals for years, it institutionalized the policy change in...