Dan Norman
Andres Acosta (right) plays Timothy Laughlin, a recent college grad who takes a job in the State Department.
It began during the Red Scare. Before it was over, more than 5,000 people had been fired from federal employment.
But these Americans were not targeted because of their political affiliations; they were suspected to be gay or lesbian. And the official government policy lasted until 1995.
The lesser-known “Lavender Scare” is the subject of Madison Opera’s forthcoming Fellow Travelers, which plays Feb. 7 and 9 at Overture Center’s Capitol Theater.
The company’s general director, Kathryn Smith, caught the 2018 Minnesota Opera production. “There were moments where, frankly, I was in tears,” she says. “And I thought, we’ve got to do this in Madison.”
Wisconsin’s Sen. Joseph McCarthy played a hand in the discriminatory policy, but his involvement in those purges was overshadowed by his search for Communists.
In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, barring homosexuals from federal employment. The actual number of people affected by the policy, which continued in some form until the mid-1990s, may run into the tens of thousands. “Some faced continued unemployment or underemployment, exclusion from their professions, financial strain or even ruin,” according to a 2016 article by Judith Atkins in Prologue magazine, a publication of the U.S. National Archives. “Suicide was not uncommon.”
Set in Washington, D.C., Fellow Travelers relates the growing relationship between an ardent young supporter of McCarthy and a state department official. Tinged with fear, paranoia and deceit, the story expands to include friends and colleagues. The 2016 opera, by Gregory Spears and Greg Pierce, is based on Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel.
“I thought I was pretty good on my queer history, but I wasn’t too familiar with the Lavender Scare,” says Peter Rothstein, who directs the Madison production.
Rothstein directed Fellow Travelers for Minnesota Opera and, last November, for Boston Lyric Opera. A native of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, Rothstein received his master’s degree in fine arts from UW-Madison in 1992. He co-founded and serves as artistic director of Theater Latté Da, based in the Twin Cities.
“I instantly fell in love with it, to be honest,” says Rothstein. “It has all the sophistication of a 20th century opera but it’s very tonal.”
The full impact of the Lavender Scare may never be known. Besides those fired, “others passed up opportunities for promotion, or otherwise scaled down their ambitions, for fear of attracting greater scrutiny in more prominent positions,” writes Atkins. “The total fallout in terms of ruined or truncated lives and wasted human potential is ultimately immeasurable.”
Fellow Travelers “may be a reminder of how far we’ve come,” says Smith. “And that we’re not far from a time when people were being fired for loving who they loved.”
