Scott, Bruce Chardon, 1912-2001

In 1956, Bruce Scott was fired from his job at the Labor Department because he was gay. Five years later he applied for another job at the same agency. Although he passed a qualifying exam, he was declared “ineligible for federal employment on the grounds of immoral conduct.”

In 1965, Scott appealed to the US District Court of Appeals for DC, which ruled in September 1968 that he must be considered eligible for federal employment.

BRUCE C. SCOTT INDIVIDUAL | Inducted 1993 [Now Deceased]
A Chicago resident for more than 50 years, Bruce C. Scott successfully fought federal anti-gay employment policies in groundbreaking lawsuits. In a 1965 decision with far-reaching implications, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., ruled that a vague charge of “homosexuality” could not disqualify one from federal government jobs. Scott was also and early officer of Mattachine Midwest. Born in 1912, he died in 2001.

Bruce Scott played an important, if seldom recognized, role in the history of the gay civil rights movement at the national level in the pre-Stonewall period. A federal government employee during the Joe McCarthy era, Scott was one of hundreds of gay men who lost their livelihood. But unlike most, he fought the discriminatory practices of the federal government in court, thereby providing the nascent gay movement of the 1960s with one of its earliest successes. His suit paved the way for the 1975 reversal of the federal Civil Service Commission’s exclusion of gays and lesbians. Scott was to the 1960s and civil service employment what Keith Meinhold and Joe Steffan were to the 1990s and military service.

Bruce Scott moved to Chicago in 1922, at the age of ten received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Chicago. Scott’s first job out of college was with the Corporation Counsel’s office of the City of Chicago. With an interest in government, Scott became a civil servant with the United States Department of Labor and, after serving in the Army in World War II, moved to a new position in the Department in Washington, D.C. He worked for the federal government until 1956, when he was forced to resign under the suspicion that he was homosexual.

When he reapplied to the federal government in the early 1960s, his application was refused on the grounds that he was a homosexual. By this time, Scott had helped found the Mattachine Society of Washington, an early gay rights organization. Mattachine, under the leadership of Frank Kameny, quickly adopted an activist, civil liberties agenda, following the models of the NAACP and ACLU. The group supported a number of test discrimination cases in the courts. Bruce Scott, who served as the group’s Vice-President and Secretary, was the litigant in one of the most significant such cases. In 1965, the Federal Court of Appeals ruled in Scott vs. Macy that a vague charge of “homosexuality” was not grounds for disqualification from federal employment.

Bruce Chardon Scott (March 7, 1912 - December 26, 2001) brought one of the first anti-gay employment discrimination suits in the United States. Fired from the federal civil service in 1956 for alleged homosexuality, Scott joined the Mattachine Society of Washington in the early sixties and brought suit against the federal government for re-instatement. That case, Scott v. Macy, was one of the first major gay rights legal victories and was instrumental in leading to an end of twenty-five years of anti-gay discrimination in the federal civil service.

Scott was a former officer in both the Mattachine Society of Washington and Mattachine Midwest, and was inducted into the City of Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame in 1993.

Born in Portland, Oregon, Scott moved to Chicago in 1922, at the age of ten, with his recently divorced mother. He graduated from Chicago's Tilden Technical High School, attended Armour Institute of Technology [now known as the Illinois Institute of Technology], and received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1933. Scott's first job out of college was with the Corporation Counsel's office of the City of Chicago. He went on to serve in the Army and worked for the U.S. Department of Labor for nearly twenty years before being forced to resign in 1956. Scott participated in the State of Illinois Constitutional Convention of 1969-1970, during which he drafted a proposal for a new constitution for the State of Illinois. He also served as a volunteer at Horizons.

Bruce Scott died on December 26, 2001 of Parkinson's disease at the age of 89. At Scott's request, there was no funeral or memorial service. He is survived by his longtime companion Larry Bloom.