While I'll grant you that the anti-sodomy legislation of early America that many folks today assume were enacted as anti-gay measures actually weren't ("sodomy" was a blanket term for non-procreative sex acts and/or y'know, animal buggery), there is still strong evidence of anti-gay attitudes among regular people. Suffragettes were routinely accused of being lesbians, Oregon had a gay panic in the nineteen-teens that culminated in a law that allowed for sterilization of "sexual perverts" (after gay men were rounded up and charged, wow I wonder what kind of sex perverts they wanted to target). Other states had similar laws for forced sterilization and also targeted gay men. In the 1920's, Harvard was kicking out gay students and the New York Assembly amended it's obscenity code to ban the discussion of homosexuality from the stage.

In the 40's you could be barred from serving in the military if you were gay, and if you were already serving and found out, you could be kicked out and denied GI Bill benefits. The Soviet Union was sentencing gay men to labor prisons and the Nazis were, well, Naziing as they did all over gay people. When Allies were liberating concentration camps, gay people leaving the camps could still be sent to prison! Look at how Alan Turing, a fucking hero, was treated by his own country after he was found out to be gay.

That's all from Googling for five seconds, for fuck's sake. LGBT people had a shitty time of it well before McCarthyism, it's documented fact. HTH.