This month marked the 40th anniversary of the cinematic release of Clue, which starred a stellar ensemble cast that included Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Eileen Brennan, Christopher Lloyd, Lesley Ann Warren, and others. The filmmakers shot multiple endings, and much like the Parker Brothers’ game that inspired it, each of those endings revealed a different culprit responsible for the murders. Upon its 1985 release, moviegoers went to the theater unsure of which of the three endings they might see.

They also learned that the film didn’t follow the classic whodunit formula à la Agatha Christie, one with clues and red herrings sprinkled throughout the story. The film was instead a screwball comedy, one with an outrageous script written by John Landis (National Lampoon’s Animal House, 1978) and Jonathan Lynn (Yes Minister, 1980-84).

While the film flopped at the box office, it found new life upon its release on VHS and cable. In their homes, audiences could watch all three endings now spliced together (including one identified as the definitive ending, or “what really happened”) and embraced it as the comedic gem it intended to be.

But the film does more than deliver laughs. Set in a New England estate in 1954, the film also tells a story about the late Cold War of the 1980s. Through its humor and satire, Clue became a pop culture mirror into Reagan-era American politics and culture, one that looked to—and even helped reevaluate—the memory of the 1950s to lay bare the era’s rising conservatism.

The 1985 film is based on the board game that first became popular in the 1950s. Inspired by the popular murder mysteries of the 1930s and 1940s, a British man named Anthony E. Pratt came up with the idea for a board game that turned players into sleuths. He did most of his work between 1943-45 while being quarantined indoors during the air raids of World War II. By 1947, he patented and sold the game as Clue (or, in England, as Cluedo). By 1950, U.S. advertisements for the game promised it was “stimulating for grownups” and “instructive for children,” since it helped them “to reason and think deductively.”

Several decades later, writers brought a Cold War lens to interpreting the game’s characters on the silver screen. The plot centered around a group of characters given unusual hue-inspired aliases, such as Professor Plum and Colonel Mustard, because they were all being blackmailed for illegal activities or indiscretions. Viewers learned that Mrs. Peacock was a senator’s wife who took bribes for votes and Miss Scarlet ran a brothel frequented by a well-connected clientele in Washington, D.C.

In particular, Mr. Green’s backstory resonated with an often-forgotten episode of the early Cold War: the expulsion and harassment of gay and lesbian workers from federal employment. He reveals he’s “a homosexual” who works for the State Department. Mr. Green tells his fellow victims of blackmail that he feels “no personal shame or guilt” about it, but he must conceal he’s gay or risk losing his “job on security grounds.”

Such a fictional story line was rooted in a historical reality. Through several official policies passed in the early Cold War, the federal government began associating gay people as national security risks. From President Harry Truman’s “loyalty program” in 1947 to President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 passage of Executive Order 10450, policies prohibited people who engaged in behaviors deemed immoral, including homosexuality, from being on the federal government’s payroll. From 1947 to 1950 alone, at least 1,700 people were kept from working in the federal government because they were suspected of being homosexual.

To that end, politicians, media outlets, and others in power pushed an unfounded narrative that peddled on both the era’s anti-communist anxieties and rampant homophobia. The justification behind the policies was that gay people employed in the federal government had access to top security information. Since homosexuality was criminalized and viewed as socially reprehensible, foreign agents and communists could leverage any knowledge of their sexuality to blackmail them into handing over confidential sources.

This is what made them, much like Mr. Green, a “national security risk”—even though no confirmed case ever emerged. In fact, in one of the film’s endings, audiences learn that Mr. Green was actually an undercover law enforcement officer working for FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. As if poking fun of the absurdity of his situation, he ends the scene by quipping: “I’m going to go home and sleep with my wife.”

In the context of 1985, this casual reference to recent Cold War history coincided with significant changes happening in politics and the study of history. It was only in 1975 that the U.S. Civil Service Commission ended its ban on employing lesbians and gays in federal positions. At the same time, a handful of scholars had just begun producing formalized knowledge in a then-small field, “Gay and Lesbian History,” which turned the memories of this history into formal scholarship. In 1983, John D’Emilio, who received his doctorate in history from Columbia University, published the groundbreaking book, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, which chronicled the actual history behind Mr. Green’s character. (Nearly 20 years later, in 2004, that history would become popularly known as the “lavender scare,” a queer rendering of the “red scare,” following the publication of historian David K. Johnson’s influential book of the same name).

The 1985 film made several other overtures to these memories of the past—as the McCarthy era was firmly in the rearview mirror—with observations of the filmmakers’ present. A law enforcement officer posing as an evangelist who tells the suspects that their “souls are in danger” catches the murderer. In an era of conservative Christian political advocacy, including the influence of the Moral Majority (founded in 1979) political organization, the film charged an imposter religious figure with policing a group of people deemed immoral. The film encourages audiences to rethink which characters carry the story’s moral center.

Indeed, by the time the film was released, gay activists had intensified their protests and calls for government action in response to HIV/AIDS, a then-deadly disease that had entered the American consciousness just a few years prior in 1981. Much like the lavender scare of the 1950s scapegoated gays as national security risks, cultural warriors of the New Right, a political and cultural movement that married the Republican Party with the Religious Right, scapegoated gays and other marginalized groups for AIDS and a perceived sense of moral decay.

As we revisit the film today, four decades after its release and during a period that echoes the culture and anti-leftist fears of McCarthyism, a new generation of viewers may find meaning and inspiration in _Clue’_s comedic genius. It reminds us that we should never discount the histories waiting to be told in our streaming content, music, advertising campaigns, TikTok reels, and the like. As historians continue to pay pop culture the respect it deserves, they help show how the study of history is often, like Clue, about what happens all around us as we try to figure out whodunit, where, and with what.

Julio Capó, Jr. is a professor of history and public humanities at Florida International University and is currently writing a new book on Florida’s decades-old role in shaping our democracy.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.