What Would It Take To Make The Next Lavender Scare Impossible?

The following article was written by Luke Schleusener, co-founder and CEO of Out in National Security. You can read the original article here.

In June 2024, the Pentagon hosted a Pride ceremony, an annual event since 2012. Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks and other senior leaders spoke about inclusion and belonging, the idea that every qualified American is welcome to serve.

For a building that once codified exclusion, the moment felt like symbolic recognition: hard-won, overdue, and fragile.

Less than a year later, that promise is under strain. Federal directives have scrubbed references to transgender people, while Executive Order 14168 now requires recognition of “biological sex” only. New DoD guidance directs bathroom and facility use to follow that definition, a quiet return to surveillance in bodily space.

The Pentagon has signaled that a renewed transgender service ban has been implemented in the name of “readiness.” Meanwhile, an OPM memo ordered agencies to dismantle LGBTQIA+ employee resource groups, purge pronoun statements and “gender ideology” from communications, and remove webpages on gender identity.

In January 2025, DOJ Pride, a three-decade-old employee network, disbanded itself, citing threats to member safety. The Justice Department’s Gender Equality Network went dark soon after.

In October, the FBI dismissed a trainee who had kept a small Pride flag on their desk, calling it “an inappropriate display of political signage.” The message is unmistakable and chilling: shrink the circle of trust.

The 2025 political realignment has turned identity politics into a stress test for democracy itself: executive orders redefining “sex,” proposals to defund diversity programs, and new scrutiny for queer and trans public servants. The same state that once purged them now debates whether their inclusion endangers readiness.

History does not repeat itself; it renegotiates the past and the future. Remembering the purge, and how democracies unlearn fear, matters urgently again.

In October 2025, more than a year after that Pentagon ceremony, I walked through Love in a Dangerous Time at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, an exhibit telling the story of Canada’s LGBT Purge. Visitors enter a dim “Dark Space” modeled on an interrogation room, pass blacked-out memos and redacted dossiers, and end in a re-creation of a queer bar once surveilled by the RCMP.

History becomes architecture: artifacts and absences. Many of the curators are friends and colleagues from the LGBT Purge Fund, which used settlement dollars not just for compensation but for promoting memory. So far, they have organized a traveling exhibit, a national monument, and education so the country would remember what it once did to its own.

Standing in that room, I felt what policy language cannot express: the weight of stories our country still refuses to archive. The experience felt like looking into a fun-house mirror of America’s Lavender Scare, the same machinery of suspicion refracted through a different Constitution after World War II.

In the 1950s, thousands of Americans lost federal jobs under Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450. Personnel files stamped sexual perversion became the quiet bureaucracy of exile. It is also an example of how the past is erased. Fire queer people as risks, police them for secrecy, then decades later, ask them to guard the secret of what happened.

These things happened across the free world, but the difference is in what came next. In Ottawa and London, the purges became public history, complete with apology, compensation, and exhibits. In Washington, despite scholarship that documents the period, the same era remains scattered through court cases, memos, and a patchwork of executive orders vulnerable to every election.

A decade has passed since John Kerry’s 2017 apology to gay and lesbian employees dismissed from the Foreign Service, but for most Americans, the only memorial to that history arrived through art. Fellow Travelers, first Thomas Mallon’s novel and later the 2023 Showtime series, turned the Lavender Scare into romance and tragedy, televised memory standing in for a museum that never came.

Cultural memory has outpaced political will, and fiction now does the work that legislation will not.

But other countries have demonstrated how a political reckoning might occur. Canada’s began in 2018 with a class-action settlement that created the LGBT Purge Fund, earmarking money for monuments and public education. The Winnipeg exhibit, is part of that legacy, is open through early 2026.

The United Kingdom followed suit in 2023 with Lord Etherton’s independent review, which documented decades of dismissals, issued 49 recommendations, and led to a two-year compensation scheme of up to £70,000 per veteran, along with record corrections and medal reinstatements.

Both governments acted only after years of survivor organizing, proof that bureaucracies do not repent; citizens make them. These are imperfect acts, but they are laws, budgets, and deadlines, not just gestures.

By contrast, the United States has implemented reform in fragments, and without the reckoning: executive orders against discrimination in clearances, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and a decade of discharge upgrades.

This has proven to be brittle. The absence of an American Purge Fund, a museum exhibit, or a statutory redress scheme is not only about money. It is about how a state proves itself trustworthy to citizens it once expelled. Without congressional entrenchment and public memory, LGBTIA+ inclusion can swing with the political winds. One administration recognizes; another erases. A ceremony proclaims welcome; a directive or executive order closes the door.

For over half a century, queer and trans Americans were told they endangered secrets. Today, many hold the clearances they, or their forebears, once lost. But why, you might ask, would LGBTIA+ people seek to be included by those who stubbornly maintain an atmosphere and structure of distrust?

For one thing, the paradox of seeking inclusion in institutions that once excluded you is not unique to the military. As Neil J. Young shows in Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (2024), queer conservatives have long sought to belong inside political and defense institutions that defined them as suspect, negotiating loyalty where full acceptance never came.

What has never been fully purged or redressed in the United States is the pervasive belief that LGBTIA+ people are inherently untrustworthy. Trust in national security is vital to what a state does. And trust is not a feeling; it is an administrative design. Clearances, discharge codes, and personnel policies define belonging.

Their story, like ours, reminds us that entry into power does not create equality within the structures of power. Some will say the United States government is simply larger and therefore, slower to change. True, and relevant. Britain’s armed forces number about 181,000; Canada’s regular and reserve forces together roughly 75,000. By contrast, the United States’ defense establishment is vast: across the active, Guard, and Reserve components, it includes about 2.5 million people, and the Department of Defense directly employs roughly one in every hundred Americans.

That scale brings extraordinary responsibility for oversight, as well as difficulties in implementing that oversight. The House and Senate Armed Services Committees hold unmatched authority over personnel policy, but they—and hte bodies they report to— also create countless veto points that can stall reform for years.

In a system so sprawling, every act of inclusion must survive not only bureaucracy but Congress itself. The machinery is immense, and apologies can get lost in the gears. That explains delay; it does not excuse it. Catching up would start with a few unglamorous changes.

• Legislate automatic record correction and benefit restoration for those purged, with mandated public reporting.

• Fund a national traveling exhibit on the U.S. federal purge, partnered with the Smithsonian and National Archives, and establish a permanent installation on federal property

• Teach this history in professional-military and civil-service education, so the next generation can recognize exclusion when it reappears under new names.

• And yes, symbols matter: bans on flying Pride flags should be rescinded at every level of government. A flag is never just fabric; it is a claim about who counts. But a flag alone cannot be responsible for memory. We need walls that teach, public education budgets that endure, and laws that outlast elections.

Back in Winnipeg, I lingered before a panel describing how settlement funds were set aside for remembrance, a form of compensation for those who never lived to receive even an apology.

I thought about American friends who lost careers to a similar bureaucracy, their stories still buried in file cabinets and footnotes. I thought of the Pentagon ceremony in 2024 and how quickly its promise was reversed, how abruptly the script of inclusion can flip, and how the burden always falls on the same people to keep reading the lines aloud.

The question is not whether another apology will come, but whether it will produce a different outcome.