There is a long article in the Seattle Weekly about William Hamilton Martin and Bernon Mitchell, two young mathematicians who worked for the National Security Agency and defected to the Soviet Union in 1960. Stunned and perplexed, officials soon associated the defection with the pair’s homosexuality.

Looking back, some of the defectors’ neighbors and co-workers told investigators that if they’d been more vigilant about the pair’s sexual proclivities, maybe they’d have been more suspicious of their patriotism.

In the eyes of many Americans, sexual deviants — then the commonly used term for homosexual men — were potential traitors, a belief that’s been perpetuated in more modern times. A 1991 Pentagon study of paraphilia (kinky or bizarre sexual behaviors) issued by the Defense Security Service and used today in military circles counts Martin and Mitchell among a group of “publicly known homosexuals” who betrayed their country. Political, counterintelligence, and religious Internet sites currently refer to Martin “and his gay friend,” and a 1997 book, The Homosexual Revolution, informs readers that the two “were homosexuals who had been permitted access to classified information.”

But according to the NSA’s own investigative files, obtained exclusively by Seattle Weekly, there’s one major problem with the flaming traitor theory: Martin and Mitchell weren’t gay.

The story is fascinating to read for half a dozen reasons. The thing that really strikes you, however, is the way in which sexual deviance was used to explain away a political act. Rather than confront the unsettling implications of the young men’s treason — rather than wonder why they disparaged their own country — people just dismissed them as “queers and reds.” It’s as though the stereotyped effeminacy of homosexuals softened the threat of their departure, or as though the disregard which people displayed toward homosexuals made their defection insignificant. “What’s to miss? They’re just fags.”

In a way this is all ancient history, particularly since homosexuals have gained tremendously in social standing today. But as is so often the case with the past, you can’t help but wonder what lessons it holds for the present. If you step out of the norm in one sense, are you damned to be perceived as abnormal in every sense? Are dissidents all deviants? Is patriotism incompatible with perversion? Of course not. There are sexual radicals who vote conservative, and political liberals who go no further than the missionary position in the bedroom. Reality is complicated — but human judgement tends to err on the side of simplicity, or perhaps on the side of the simple-minded.

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