There are certain behind-the-scenes figures in American politics who, like Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, seem to turn up everywhere. One of the most notorious is Roy Cohn, a man whose influence spans several decades of hot button issues, Republican politicians and LGBT history.
Cohn was a prosecutor in the Rosenberg spy trial, chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, a close friend to Nancy Reagan and a personal lawyer for Donald Trump. He was also a closeted gay man who helped purge suspected gay and lesbian employees from the government. Cohn died from AIDS-related complications in 1986, and afterwards was portrayed in the 1990s Broadway play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.
McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare
Roy Cohn entered the spotlight early. At age 23, he was a prosecutor on the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union in 1951 and executed by electric chair two years later. This gained him attention from two fervent anti-communists: longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Cohn became chief counsel to McCarthy as well as a chief architect of what we now call “McCarthyism”—the interrogation and purging of federal employees based on McCarthy’s unsupported claim that the government was filled with communists. In addition to this very public Second Red Scare, Cohn and McCarthy also led the less-public Lavender Scare against federal employees suspected of being gay.
It’s unknown how many employees the Lavender Scare forced out between the late ‘40s and early ‘60s, but the number is likely in the thousands. Like communists, McCarthy considered gay people security risks because of their supposed mental instability.
“In lavender Washington, Cohn was known as both a closeted homosexual and homophobic, among those leading the charge against supposedly gay witnesses who he and others believed should lose their government jobs because they were ‘security risks,’” writes journalist Marie Brenner in Vanity Fair.
Hellbound and Down 