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The Department Of Justice Was Just Ordered To Find And Release 1950s Gay "Purge" Documents

"We’re talking about tens of thousands of people over the years investigated and ruined by this executive order," plaintiff Charles Francis told NBC News.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

J Edgar Hoover (1895 -1972) points his finger while testifying before the House on Un-American Activities Committee, Washington, DC. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
By Sam Manzella
August 4, 2017 / 1:39 PM

Gay "purge" doesn't ring a bell? That's because, until now, the governmental affair from the '50s was kept relatively under wraps.

Now, the Department of Justice is being ordered to locate and release any documents related to the "purge" of thousands of LGBT employees from government ranks under FBI head J. Edgar Hoover. The records are related to then-President Dwight Eisenhower's Executive Order 10450, which afforded FBI agents the authority to terminate government employees if they posed a suspected risk to national security.

Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Getty Images

5th November 1956: Dwight D Eisenhower (1890 - 1969) the 34th President of the United States of America. Original Publication: Picture Post - 8718 - They Still Like Ike - pub. 1956 (Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Getty Images)

But queer historians and plaintiffs in a D.C. district court suit claim that the order's authority was actually used to justify the termination of thousands of LGBT government employees well beyond Eisenhower's administration.

Charles Francis, the lawsuit's plaintiff and president of LGBT advocacy group The Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., explained the detrimental and humiliating effects of the FBI's investigations on LGBT Americans.

"We’re talking about tens of thousands of people over the years investigated and ruined by this executive order; lives were shattered," Francis told NBC News. "You were branded ‘immoral’ and ruined if you were labeled a homosexual in the 1950s ... and these papers remain locked away in federal vaults. It's time now for the Department of Justice and the FBI to work with us and release all of it."

Charles Francis | The Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C.

The firings allegedly continued well into the '70s. It was only in 1995, went President Bill Clinton signed an executive order banning the FBI from denying LGBT government employees security clearance solely on a basis of their sexuality or gender identity, that the "purge" completely and legally came to a close.

The Mattachine Society filed a Freedom of Information Act request to view historical records regarding the firings in 2013, but the request was denied. The group then teamed up with McDermott Will & Emery, a D.C. law firm, to file a lawsuit in 2016.

Lisa Linsky, a partner at the law firm, told NBC News that the district court's decision was a "tremendous victory."

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