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2 KOREA AND THE COLD WAR It seemed as if Americans were just cleaning up the ticker tape from World War II victory parades when the Cold War began in the late 1940s. Communism eclipsed fascism as the greatest apparent threat to democracy and capitalism. Formerly allies, the Soviet Union and the United States soon faced o√ across an ideological abyss. Since direct military conflict between the superpowers risked atomic war and later, nuclear holocaust, the Cold War was fought primarily through proxy wars in the developing world and espionage in the developed world. Korea, divided after World War II between a communist regime in the north and a capitalist one in the south, became the site of one of the first proxy wars. When the North Koreans launched an invasion to reunify the country in the summer of 1950, the United States quickly intervened. Because of the communist revolution in China only one year earlier, American policymakers feared that if they did not intervene in Korea, all of Asia might fall to communism . A u.s.-led multinational force fought alongside the South Koreans and under the auspices of a United Nations resolution to bring peace to the region. General Douglas MacArthur orchestrated a surprise landing of the un forces at Inchon in the fall of 1950 that turned the tide against the North Korean army; but when the un forces launched a countero√ensive into North Korea, Chinese troops intervened, and the war bogged down into a bloody stalemate. The signing of an armistice in 1953 ended overt military conflict, but it did not bring peace. Two of the interviewees in this chapter saw action in Korea. Ric MendozaGleason served ten years in the army, a few of them on the ground in Korea. He landed at Inchon after the initial invasion, and though he ‘‘felt relatively 30 korea and the cold war safe’’ as a supply clerk, he was close enough to the front lines to pull dangerous guard duty and to console a mortally wounded marine comrade. According to Ric, there was very little homophobia in the army ranks during the war. Ric’s experiences stand in stark contrast to those of William Winn, a navy doctor who had begun his service as a medic on the home front in World War II before graduating from medical school and serving as a ship’s doctor during the Korean conflict. William saw a rise in homophobia both on the home front and in the wartime navy. Still, the numbers of undesirable discharges for gay sailors during the years of the Korean conflict (483 in 1950 and 533 in 1951) were less than half the number in the year that the armistice was signed (1,353 in 1953). In fact, the number of gay-related discharges in the navy would not fall below 500 again until 1970 when the u.s. was involved in another Cold War conflict in Asia.∞ The relatively small number of undesirable discharges in the navy during the Korean War era should not be misconstrued as an indication that the government was going easy on gays and lesbians. Ric Mendoza-Gleason remembers that for gay people ‘‘it was a nightmare here in the States.’’ In the early 1950s, the military, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and even the u.s. Postal Service conducted surveillance of suspected homosexuals. Such federal initiatives against homosexuality mirrored antigay policies at the state and local levels and increasingly conservative community mores that led to action against gays and lesbians in both the public and private sectors.≤ It began with a Senate subcommittee hearing in early 1950 when a State Department o≈cial admitted that several dozen employees recently fired by the department had been homosexuals. In an atmosphere marked by the hysteria of Joseph McCarthy’s earlier warning that communists had infiltrated the State Department, fear of a ‘‘homosexual menace’’ gripped the Senate, inspiring a formal investigation of ‘‘sexual perverts’’ in the federal government . This investigation led to the dismissal of hundreds of gay and lesbian federal employees in the second half of 1950 alone. The historian David K. Johnson has called this the ‘‘lavender scare,’’ a paranoia that reinforced the Red Scare rhetoric about invisible threats to America’s national security.≥ The lavender scare was based on the assumption that gay military personnel and other federal employees were susceptible to blackmail by enemy agents who could threaten to reveal the gay Americans’ secret...

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