Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 2, Summer 2005 | Page 88

84 Popular Culture Review The linking of Jews and child molestation is as old as Christianity. The “common knowledge” was immortalized by Geoffrey Chaucer in the tale the Prioress told on the way to Canterbury. Shakespeare used a similar stereotype in The Merchant o f Venice. Anti-Semitism has a long history in America as well. It seems less than coincidental that the two Americans executed for treason during the McCarthy era were Jewish: the “Communist spies” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Homosexuals were a “natural” addition to Jews and Communists, especially since they were defined primarily by their sexuality, an uncomfortable topic rarely openly discussed in post-WWn “Christian” America. The stereotyping worked and quickly took root. During the McCarthy era more homosexuals were “weeded out” and fired than Communists. Gays were regularly barred from taverns and restaurants, barred from public assembly, and barred from using the U.S. Postal Service to send newsletters. In 1953 President Dwight Eisenhower signed an executive order barring homosexuals from government jobs as well as other forms of employment. And, as Professor Chauncey noted, homosexuals had no freedom of assembly or speech and could be arrested on simple “suspicion”—behaviors such as “gesturing with limp wrists,” walking “with a sway to the hips,” and “wearing tight fitting trousers”—and sent to mental hospitals until “cured,” despite claims by prison doctors that “cures” were not possible. Those pri