Homosexuality No Longer a Bar to Immigration
The Immigration Act of 1990, enacted on this day, eliminated the category of “sexual deviation” as grounds for denying people immigration into the United States.
The category originated with the repressive McCarran-Walter Act, passed on June 27, 1952, in the midst of the national homophobic panic that has been labelled the “Lavender Scare” (see, for example, November 27, 1950.)
The McCarran-Walter Act was primarily ideological, creating new authority to exclude alleged subversives and to deport alien subversives already in the country.
Learn more at Lambda Legal: http://www.lambdalegal.org/
Read: David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (2004)
Read about the history of sex -and homosexuality– and the U.S. Constitution: Geoffrey R. Stone, Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the Twenty-First Century (2017)
See the documentary: The Lavender Scare (2012): http://www.thelavenderscare.com/
Watch “Boys Beware,” classic homophobic warning film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2zikCUPPxw