Over the years gay people have certainly been maginalised, but for various reasons the extent of that marginalisation has often been overlooked or pushed to one side. For example, that’s certainly true of things such as the ‘Red Scare’ of the 1950s and 1960s in the US.
Many people know about the Hollywood blacklist, which was certainly egregious but only affected a relatively few people, but fewer are aware of the US government’s systematic witchhunt against gay people that happened in tandem with that, where people weren’t just told to be on the lookout for communists, but also for gay people, who it was claimed weren’t just more likely to be Reds, but also needed to be routed out from all ogvernment jobs because the were a ‘blackmail risk’.
Part of Yahoo!’s Viewfinder series, Uniquely Nasty, which features narration by Matt Bomer and George Takei, focuses on the decades of persecution LGBT faced at the hands the American government, including such things as McCarthy’s crusade against LGBT people in the 1950s.
Yahoo’s chief investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff told OUT that, ‘The film centers on Charles Francis, once a close friend of George W. Bush, who served as his emissary to the gay community in the 2000 campaign and then grew disillusioned in 2004 when the Bush re-election campaign used gay marriage as a wedge issue. It set Francis off on a mission to uncover “the deleted history” of the persecution of gays and lesbians by the U.S. government, and he has turned up some amazing documents about the FBI’s “sex deviates” program and other matters that we’ll be showing for the first time in the film.’
The film is due to air on Yahoo! on June 22nd.
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