... having been breathed out

[Under the McCarran-Walter Act,] a prohibition barring aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality was enacted in 1952 to explicitly prevent homosexual aliens from entering or remaining in the [United States]. […] Yet just like the military’s policy on tendencies, this finely honed tool relied on ambiguity to do its work. This was not an accidental ambiguity, it was an instrumental one. “Loosely written laws” were called for because they widened the net as to what kinds of evidence could be “read” by state officials as homosexuality. […]

Ultimately, though, it was not medical professionals who stirred the pot. Despite the fact that homosexual exclusion relied on the psychiatric category of psychopathy, the medical consensus about what defined homosexuality was breaking down just as a bureaucratic consensus was solidifying. Many psychiatrists were reluctant to equate homosexual acts with homosexual people, or to tag the latter with the label of psychopathy. Because the law required the Public Health Service (PHS) psychiatrists to certify aliens as psychopathic prior to deportation, the increasing defection of medical experts left federal officials in a difficult position. When aliens facing deportation pointed strategically to scientific uncertainty surrounding the definition of both homosexuality and psychopathic personality, moreover, courts countered that these were, in fact, legal rather than medical terms. According to the law, they insisted, one who had homosexual sex was a homosexual person and a psychopath. With homosexuality defined as a nonmedical category, however, the PHS relinquished all responsibility for certification, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was left as the primary arbiter of homosexuality among aliens. By the late 1970s—with different political investments in the issue—the PHS, the INS, and the federal courts had thus all converged on the idea of homosexuality as a legal construct.

—Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (bolding added)

Man, I didn’t know any of this. The immigration stuff in this book is among the most revelatory, at least for me—and that’s saying something, because the welfare and military chapters are extremely eye-opening as well.

Among the things my brain is really chewing on: the ease with which loosely-written laws become tools of specific, targeted abuse; the blatant weaponization of psychiatric concepts which, when rejected by the medical community itself, were simply coopted by the legal system instead; and the equation of “homosexual” with “person who has same-gender sex"—which, as the next paragraph goes on to say, eliminated a whole palette of sexual shades of grey that existed (legally) in the first half of the 20th century, and simultaneously made heterosexual status more difficult to prove/attain.

Extremely thought-provoking stuff.