Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer: "Washington Confidential", 1951

Washington Confidential, a book published in 1951 by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, contains a chapter entitled IIA Garden of Pansies," which well conveys some popular feelings and beliefs concerning homosexuals in that witch-hunt era:

The only way to get authoritative data on fairies is from other fairies. They recognize each other by a fifth sense immediately, and they are intensely gregarious. One cannot snoop at every desk and count people who appear queer. Some are deceptive to the uninitiated. But they all know one another and they have a grapevine of intercommunication as swift and sure as that in a girls' boarding school. Since they have no use for women in the main, and are uneasy with masculine men, they have a fierce urge, even beyond the call of the physical, for each other's society. They have their own hangouts, visit one another, and cling together in a tight union of interests and behavior.

Not all are ashamed of the trick that nature played on them. They have their leaders, unabashed, who are proud queens and who revel in their realm. ...

No one knows how many lesbians there are, because the female-or is it male of the pervert species is seldom spoken about and is much less obvious. Psychiatrists and sociologists who have made a study of the problem in Washington think there are at least twice as many Sapphic lovers as fairies. A large incidence of lesbianism is concomitant with the shortage of men, where women work together, live together, play together, so love together.

Some display themselves, strut around in fairy joints; all queers are in rapport with all others. You will see them also in some of the late bottle-clubs, on the make for the same girls the he-wolves are chasing.

The mannish women used to hang out at the Show Boat Bar, H and 13th, until the management drove them out. Now in David's Grill., formerly the Horseshoe, in back of the Mayflower Hotel, they outnumber the pansies who haunted the place ....

With more than 6,000 fairies in government offices, you may be concerned about the security of the country. Fairies are no more disloyal than the normal. But homosexuals are vulnerable, they can be blackmailed or influenced by sex more deeply than conventional citizens; they are far more intense about their lovelife.

The authors quote Congressman A. L. Miller of Nebraska, a physician, and "author of the District's new bill to regulate homos"; Miller told Lait and Mortimer of foreign agents being

given a course in homosexuality, then taught to infiltrate in perverted circles in other countries. Congressman Miller said: ...

"The homosexual is often a man of considerable intellect and ability. It is found that the cycle of these individuals' homosexual desires follows the cycle closely patterned to the menstrual period of women. There may be three or four days in each month that the homosexual's instincts break down and drive the individual into abnormal fields of sexual practice. Under large doses of sedatives during this sensitive cycle, he may escape such acts.