Dangerous Liaisons

During the 1950s and ’60s, the basement tavern at Ottawa’s Lord Elgin hotel was a much-frequented watering hole for middle-level bureaucrats. It was also a popular gay meeting place. Thanks to this latter reputation, it also occasionally hosted mysterious individuals who would hide behind open newspapers and snap furtive photos with pint-sized cameras. The bar’s habitués were well aware of the interlopers’ game. A former regular customer recalled in an interview with authors Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile that “we always knew that when you saw someone with a newspaper held up in front of their face … that somebody would take out something like a wallet.” He recalled that someone in the bar would then take out a wallet or package of matches and motion over to the newspaper reader. “It was always sort of a joke … and you would catch everyone’s eye.”

Not that such activity gave real cause for mirth. The RCMP’s security campaign directed at gays employed in the federal public service was all too serious, and so were its results. As Kinsman and Gentile make clear in The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation, the campaign’s damaging effects on the thousands of Canadians caught up in its web of suspicion, intrigue and purges deserve far greater attention than they have traditionally received. Although many of us have heard about the dismissal of John Grierson from the National Film Board for his communist sympathies, there is a general impression that McCarthy-style fear mongering had little parallel in Canada. Apparently not true. In international intelligence circles, the Canadian security establishment made its mark thanks to its obsession with secrecy. “In Canada, the security system is a tough one,” argued an American security publication. “There is less concern than in the United States about the rights of individuals involved. To Canadian officials, safety of the state comes first.”

Many details of the campaign have only recently come to light. Kinsman and Gentile have collected a raft of documents previously under government seal and conducted interviews with some of the men and women directly affected. The evidence shows that the security service’s anti-gay initiative had a definite start date: 1958. For several years prior, there had been growing unease in Canada, as elsewhere, over the security dangers posed by individuals deemed susceptible to KGB-initiated blackmail. Given the supposed character flaws associated with homosexuality—“instability, willing self-deceit, defiance towards society,” in the words of one federal memorandum—gays were of particular concern. The unmasking of the English spy Guy Burgess had not helped; nor had several other breaches of official secrecy in the United States and Britain in which gays had been implicated. The initiating episode in Canada was far more mundane— the murder at the Esquimalt naval base of a sailor named Aaron Jenkins by his spurned boyfriend. The discovery of Jenkins’s address book, which contained the names of an extensive network of gay men, many in the military, spurred the RCMP to begin tracking government and military employees suspected of homosexuality—part of the force’s role as the investigative arm of the federal intelligence entity known as the Security Panel.

By the early 1960s a specially instituted “character deviance committee” of the Security Panel was overseeing the files on this list, which were distinguished by the addition of a specially placed digit, seven, to an individual’s file code number. The suspect list expanded as a result of security checks on federal and military employees, especially those seeking secret or top secret clearance, which required direct RCMP scrutiny. A 1950s-era article published in a professional civil service journal gives some idea of the criteria used in the investigations:

In clearance checks of members of the Royal Canadian Navy and the Department of External Affairs, sexual proclivities received special attention. These two branches of government were thought to contain the widest gay networks. The notion that life at sea held special gay attractions was hardly new. In the case of External Affairs, the magnet was thought to be its caste-like elitist institutional culture and favouritism to bachelors able to accept foreign posts without family responsibilities. The sensitive nature of the department’s work automatically gave it a high security profile, especially in the aftermath of two KGB blackmail attempts involving gay members of Canada’s Moscow embassy, each reputedly involving in flagrante delicto photos with Russians. While neither attempt succeeded in netting official secrets for the Soviets, the embassy member involved in one of these episodes—Canadian ambassador John Watkins—was long able to keep his episode hidden, until a tipoff led to an RCMP interrogation, during which Watkins died of a heart attack.

There was another way suspects were identified and information extracted, in this case with implications for all gays in the federal public service. In Ottawa, for example, police were known to patrol gay haunts such as Major’s Hill Park on the banks of the Ottawa River behind the Château Laurier and the equally leafy confines of the Rideau River’s Strathcona Park. They did so with an ulterior purpose Individuals apprehended by these patrols, after being passed on to the RCMP, were often willing to go to extreme lengths to avoid criminal charges. In such circumstances, physical intimidation was by no means unheard of. One of Kinsman and Gentile’s interviewees described his ordeal: “When they question you, and corner you, and seat you between two stalwart bodies in the back seat of a car,” he noted, “and take you to some isolated spot and question you, you don’t know whether you are going to come out alive or not.”

By the early 1960s, the effectiveness of such techniques—which Kinsman and Gentile rightly label a form of officially sanctioned blackmail—was already beginning to fade in the wake of liberalizing social attitudes and growing gay solidarity. In the anodyne words of a 1963 RCMP report, “During the past fiscal year the homosexual screening program … was hindered by the lack of cooperation on the part of homosexuals approached as sources.”

Security officials needed a new method to replace old-style coercion to root out suspected gays, and psychological screening offered hope. At this point, Kinsman and Gentile’s story gains a central figure. Frank R. Wake was an American-born psychologist teaching at Carleton University. Given his interest in sexual attitudes and behaviour, the Security Panel requested that he research ways of identifying gay traits. In his initial report, Wake proposed several avenues. One was to gauge the length of a subject’s attention span when exposed to nude photographs of either sex. He also suggested masculine/feminine psychological tests to measure the extent to which a subject of either gender identified with traits more usually identified with the opposite sex. (Wake’s recommended statements included “If I were a reporter I would like very much to report news of the theatre,” “I like mechanics magazines,” “I think I would like the work of a dress designer” and “I very much like hunting.”) In addition, he designed word association tests he thought might reveal a subject’s identification with gay-coded terms (among terms geared to gay males were “queen,” “camp,” “coo” and “tea room”). Wake proposed that subjects complete these tests while connected to a device known as a plethysmograph to measure anxiety-induced fluctuations in blood flow as well as to an instrument monitoring perspiration levels.

Once he was given the go-ahead to begin testing, Wake made use of a group of gays supplied by the RCMP. His control group was originally to have been drawn from the ranks of the RCMP itself, until rank-and-file reluctance necessitated a switch to the military, whose more rigorously hierarchical structure made any unwillingness of prospective subjects irrelevant. The experiments are known to have proceeded at least through the preliminary stages. Kinsman and Gentile interviewed one anonymous RCMP functionary whose job was to drive Wake’s gay subjects each night to the National Defence Medical Centre for testing. This inside source mentions that gay subjects were promised anonymity; he also notes the trouble he had finding and recruiting lesbians—an essential part of Wake’s experimental scenario. Wake made references in later published articles to conclusions apparently garnered from conducting the experimental phase. His proposed system seems to have had virtually no predictive power, and the entire enterprise was closed down, but not before gaining legendary status in Canadian security annals, along with a derisive nickname that has lived on ever since—Dr. Wake’s fruit machine.

The RCMP was left to pursue its investigations as best it could in a quickly changing social environment. While purges in the general ranks of the civil service were becoming ever more difficult, attempts to keep gays out of the ranks of the RCMP and the military could still be maintained. Surveillance efforts were relatively unaffected by the 1969 reform of the Criminal Code that legalized private homosexual acts, but by 1976 the force was on the defensive, as it lobbied to exempt itself from proposed

human rights legislation. As one spokesman put it in referring to possible requests for security information by the RCMP’s own members, such laws would “impede normal investigations carried out on prospective officers. Such investigations are done through friends and neighbours and focus on ‘character weaknesses’.” The spokesman then added some pertinent illustrations: “alcoholism, homosexuality, and traits such as extreme dependence on one’s mother.”

One area in which the RCMP continued its campaign was the monitoring of gay activists, given the close links some activists had forged with the radical left. But by mid decade these connections were fast disappearing, as sporadic opposition to gay activism intensified within the radical movement itself. This opposition was illustrated by the expulsion of activist Brian Mossop from the Communist Party in 1976, and the launch in the same year of the Trotskyite Socialist Workers’ Party’s campaign against the corrupting anti-Leninist influences of “petite-bourgeois life stylists” in its midst. Kinsman and Gentile offer a fascinating look at the complicated intrigues within the radical left during this period and the way that gay activist organizations were forced to transform themselves as they became independent players within the Canadian political scene. But by this time, Kinsman and Gentile’s overarching narrative—the so-called Canadian war on queers as a legally sanctioned, identifiable piece of security policy—was nearing its close. As the equality rights provisions in the Canadian Charter of Rights took hold during the early 1980s, even the exclusion of gays from the military, the RCMP and the newly established Canadian Security Intelligence Service was becoming problematic, although it was not until the early 1990s that these forms of exclusion officially came to an end. Of course, even today gays employed in some segments of the federal public service face uncomfortable work environments, but such chilliness is worlds away from the real risks of firing or demotion formerly faced by a much broader cross-section of gay men and women employed by the federal government.

If at times Kinsman and Gentile’s own analysis is weighed down with fashionable ideology, these flaws can be forgiven, for their story, with its revealing details and telling implications, is plainly an important one.