The Lavender Scare was a moral panic about homosexual people in the United States government which led to their mass dismissal from government service during the mid-20th century. It was a wave of repression that began in the late 1940s and continued through the 1960s, during which thousands of gay employees were fired or forced to resign from the federal workforce because of their sexuality. The Lavender Scare was bound up with anti-Communism and fueled by the power of congressional investigation. The politicians behind the Lavender Scare asserted that homosexuals were susceptible to blackmail by enemy agents and so could be coerced into revealing government secrets. The official rationale wasnt that homosexuals were communists but that they could be used by communists. The Lavender Scare helped fan the flames of the Red Scare, and in popular discourse, communists and homosexuals were often conflated. The Lavender Scare was a reaction to an earlier time of openness and visibility for the gay community. Unlike the Red Scare, the Lavender Scare featured no public naming of names and no dramatic spectacles in which the accused testified. The policy was based on the unfounded fear that gay men and lesbians "posed a threat to national security because they were vulnerable to blackmail and were considered to have weak moral characters". The Lavender Scare tied these notions together, conflating gay people with communists and alleging they could not be trusted with government secrets and labeling them as security risks, even though there was no evidence to prove this. Historians estimate that somewhere between 5,000 and tens of thousands of gay workers lost their jobs during the Lavender Scare. Some faced continued unemployment or underemployment, exclusion from their professions, financial strain or even ruin, and considerable emotional distress. Suicide was not uncommon. The Lavender Scare is the first documentary film to tell the little-known story of an unrelenting campaign by the federal government to identify and fire gay employees.