anti-Communist

For much of his professional career, Gurr was a closeted gay man, coming of age during the 1950s era of Joseph McCarthy and the Lavender Scare, the anti-communist purge of LGBTQ+ people from the U.S. government.

That generational divide was evident in many of the conversations I had with shoppers and business owners in Little Saigon, where the Republican Party has long held sway for its traditional anti-Communist stance and where support for Trump remains strong among older Vietnamese immigrants, even as many of their children reject the GOP.

In moving his antihero between Vietnam and 1970s California, home of self-obsessed good vibrations, conflicted refugees and rabid anti-communist reactionaries, Nguyen reveals a series of rich dichotomies.

It was an echo of the anti-communist rhetoric that past military dictators and subsequent conservative leaders have frequently invoked against South Korean liberals, who have long been defined by their support for reconciliation with Pyongyang.

“Red Scare” burrows deep not just into the well-known major players, including Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, and the Hollywood Ten, but also the myriad committees, opportunistic enablers and the long, long line of scapegoats who paid for the mid-20th-century anti-communist witch hunt.