Dismissal for any homosexual conduct was a "custom within the agency"
March 25, 2022 1:42 PM   Subscribe

Nature: Documents reveal NASA’s internal struggles over renaming Webb telescope - which is to say, NASA ignored evidence of James Webb's culpability in purging queer people from NASA and tried to cover it up.

Last year it came to light that the James Webb Space Telescope's titular James Webb had, in all likelihood, participated in the US federal government's purge of queer folk from government careers, aka the Lavender Scare, during his tenure at NASA.

After calls to rename the telescope, NASA engaged in a pro forma investigation that resulted in NASA declining to act, or to engage with critics. NASA administrator Bill Nelson was quoted to say, "We have found no evidence at this time that warrants changing the name of the James Webb Space Telescope", which is directly contradicted by the documents provided to journalist Alexandra Witze for Nature via their FOIA request:

As early as April 2021, an external researcher flagged wording from the 1969 court ruling to NASA officials. It came in the case of Clifford Norton, who had appealed against being fired from NASA for “immoral, indecent, and disgraceful conduct”. In the decision, the chief judge wrote that the person who had fired Norton had said that he was a good employee and asked whether there was a way to keep him on. Whomever he consulted in the personnel office told him that it was a “custom within the agency” to fire people for “homosexual conduct”.

... A white paper drawn up within NASA, and described as not meant for public release, says: “This shows that NASA had decided that removal of homosexual employees would be its policy. They had a choice during Webb’s tenure as administrator to set or change that policy.”


NASA reached out to ten 'members of the astrophysics community', all of whom were straight, about how they'd feel about not renaming the project. There was no pushback from this quarter.

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The co-authors of the petition to rename JWST have released a statement.

Two of them have also written extensive twitter threads on the topic:

Dr. Lucianne Walkowicz
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

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Related: The television series For All Mankind looks at the Lavender Scare vis a vis NASA quite directly.

Previouslies: 1 2
posted by ursus_comiter (14 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
So happy this is getting more play.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:56 PM on March 25, 2022 [4 favorites]


I'm not going to say that what James Webb did was worse or better than NASA's seeming coverup of the investigation but one can make somewhat of an argument that in 2021/2022 there is no reason to whitewash someone's legacy instead of being open, transparent and engaging with the community. Maybe renaming is actually not the best. Put an asterix by his name as a reminder of their sad legacy is better than scrambling and pretending the lavender scare didn't happen. I don't know, I'm not the best one to ask but the fact they launched an investigation they knew the outcome of beforehand was in extremely bad faith and harmful to the larger community.

This is a $10 billion space telescope that no one will ever see again. NASA couldn't earmark $5 million in LGBTQ+ outreach? Maybe LGBTQ+ STEM programs for kids, or a space camp?

Come on NASA, James Webb wasn't even the worse executive at NASA during the space race.
posted by geoff. at 2:18 PM on March 25, 2022 [12 favorites]


I'm also really glad to see more of this story being told. The Lavender Scare was a big, ugly period in the 1940s and 1950s in America, one that we have not really reconciled with. Lots of stories of discrimination, humiliation, persecution, and suicide. Also some good positive stories like Frank Kameny, he was an astronomer in the US Army before they ousted him. He then dedicated a large part of his life to gay rights activism, one of our true heroes of the movement.
posted by Nelson at 2:22 PM on March 25, 2022 [11 favorites]


Well, that's Just Wonderful.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 3:41 PM on March 25, 2022 [1 favorite]


Kinda not great that O'Keefe, the former NASA administrator who decided to name the telescope after Webb, describes being gay as "personal preferences."

Also Bill Nelson the current NASA chief said, "We have found no evidence at this time that warrants changing the name of the James Webb Space Telescope," and then their senior science communications officer, Karen Fox said, "Those efforts have not uncovered evidence warranting a name change."

That's interesting phrasing, implying not that they haven't uncovered evidence he knew or acted, just that if they have, it doesn't warrant a name change in their view.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 3:56 PM on March 25, 2022 [7 favorites]


I will never understand why NASA moved from their practice of naming these things after important astronomers and scientists (e.g. Galileo, Hubble, Spitzer, Parker), to dedicating a flagship project to some petty bureaucrat.
posted by kickingtheground at 4:24 PM on March 25, 2022 [37 favorites]


Things still have a ways to go at NASA.
They recently dropped the ability to list your pronouns in Teams.
I can confirm that's true, though we do have a workaround of adding them to our profile pictures.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 4:47 PM on March 25, 2022 [23 favorites]


This is a $10 billion space telescope that no one will ever see again. NASA couldn't earmark $5 million in LGBTQ+ outreach? Maybe LGBTQ+ STEM programs for kids, or a space camp?

Come on NASA, James Webb wasn't even the worse executive at NASA during the space race.



Can you imagine the Republican congressional queries that would ensue if NASA money was used for LGBT anything.
posted by kzin602 at 7:49 PM on March 25, 2022


Being open, transparent, and engaging with the community rather than glorifying bigots means changing the name. Naming big, prestige projects after people is uncritically celebrating them.

Putting an asterisk on the name is no solution, just as it isn't the solution to the problematic statues in town squares. You don't destroy them - you put them in museums where they can be contextualised appropriately, where they aren't on public display like they're being celebrated here.

The same logic applies here. You don't bury the memory of the Lavender scare, but you sure as shit don't remember it by celebrating the perpetrators, by naming your pinnacle of human achievement projects after them. We face museums and textbooks and history documentaries and academia for things we want to remember rather than celebrate. We have statues and naming large infrastructure or projects after people for celebrating them.

Change the fucking name of the telescope. Ideally name it after a gay person whose career was ended by James Webb.
posted by Dysk at 12:23 AM on March 26, 2022 [18 favorites]


Could be worse: they might have named the telescope after Wernher von Braun, an SS officer who built V-2 missiles using slave labour (and had slaves who were suspected of sabotage hanged). But he went to work for the US government designing missiles, then at NASA as chief architect of the Apollo program, so obviously none of that stuff happened and they're probably going to name the first Moon base after a war criminal. Assuming they can't find somebody even more hateful. Cool, cool.

(NASA has hard right skeletons in its closet. The whitewashing of Webb is a symptom of an institutional culture that is deeply reactionary and not focused on science at all.)
posted by cstross at 1:07 PM on March 26, 2022 [4 favorites]


Change the fucking name of the telescope. Ideally name it after a gay person whose career was ended by James Webb.

I do like this, but leaving the name unchanged might also remind many generations of what NASA management really is, as the layers keep getting pulled back. The name of the telescope — and the science it does — will always have an asterisk at the end of the day. As it probably should.

To my mind, an example of the other end of the spectrum is when UK repeatedly whitewashes its history as to how its officials treated Alan Turing, trying to undo their actions through one policy or government directive or another. They drove the man to an early suicide, and now they get to abuse his memory and legacy as a recruiting tool for spy operations. After time, it does seem like the numerous crimes against him have lost some of their impact.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:56 PM on March 26, 2022


I think it’s not well-established that Turing committed suicide.

Accident is more likely than suicide, and assassination by the authorities cannot be ruled out.
posted by jamjam at 3:52 PM on March 26, 2022 [1 favorite]


Turing's name is only really in the press here in Britain when the government is acknowledging and apologising for those actions. That does not have the effect of erasure. Just ignoring the situation and letting it continue without rectification feels far more like sweeping it under the carpet. Future generations will forget the asterisk far quicker than they'll fail to notice that the name of the giant piece of space infrastructure had to be changed because...

A lot of us on the receiving end of this kind of bullshit want it to stop, want it gone, not to be constantly reminded of it, nevermind that said reminder will serve to encourage and glorify.
posted by Dysk at 12:15 AM on March 27, 2022 [1 favorite]


Wernher von Braun: he meets a different fate in For All Mankind, cstross.
posted by doctornemo at 4:39 PM on March 27, 2022


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