OUT AT CHM: Sexual Politics - From the Lavender Scare to Larry Craig

OUT AT CHM: Sexual Politics - From the Lavender Scare to Larry Craig

WBEZ brings you fact-based news and information. Sign up for our newsletters to stay up to date on the stories that matter.

Kick off this election year by exploring how homosexuality repeatedly finds its way into the nation’s political spotlight.  Join gay historians David Johnson and Lane Fenrich as they recount a half-century of gay men and lesbians in the public eye.

David Johnson is a historian and the author of The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (University of Chicago Press, 2004). 

Lane Fenrich is a cultural historian of the twentieth-century U.S., currently teaching a Northwestern University.  His research focuses on the production of cultural narrative, especially discourses of memory and national identity, and he is currently finishing a book project entitled Envisioning Holocaust: Visuality and Memory at the End of the Second World War (forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press).

Please note: This reading contains sexually explicit language.

Recorded as part of the Out at CHM series, discover the long and storied history of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people through Out at CHM.

Recorded Thursday, January 31, 2008 at Chicago History Museum.