The Albertan Queer Affirmation Review identified the importance of empowering Queer storytellers. Through its ways, Treaty guarantees that two-spirit folks and others should be able to live in our cities and schools.
Queer people have the grand joy that, in being true to ourselves, we make room for and affirm Treaty. The same Treaty that allows us to be our own true selves lets others do the same and deserves empowerment. Through this, queer spaces become magic places and stories maintain that magic.
What follows comes in part from being Queer in Treaty 7.
“The Paper Trail from the Purge to Possibility” - A Queer Salon Inspired Story
Nancy read the stories. She read into points on the understated overlap of Queer diversity principles and foundational aspects of Canada and its institutions. We all want a better Canada, and especially in times of uncertainty, a strong Canada. But when we started sitting down, the conversation didn’t start with the future. It tunneled straight into the past. It started with the purge.
Canada, like many countries, has always had systems to define belonging and to stave off perceived threats. Through treaties and acts and acts of horror for indigenous peoples, internment for enemy aliens, quotas and biases for visible and religious minorities, it possessed a pre-existing bureaucratic language for removal. In the mid-20th century, it simply applied that same grammar to a new focal point. The state turned its administrative machinery and might on its own LGBTQ+ servants. The paperwork persecution was systematic, from the Cabinet table to the filing cabinets. Canada’s purge quickly became a masterclass in what happens when prejudice is codified into procedure. It aggregated out the sum of a million paper cuts—a systemic hemorrhage of talent and trust. Now, in a time of uncertainty and near crisis for Canada and its allies, we are left with a devastating irony: the very institution that helped exclude based on security now needs to recruit from the communities it sought to erase.
Going about building military strength that targets queer folks as part of a vital citizenry labor pool rather than a target for ridicule and dismissal is no small nor monolith task. But has there ever been a time the military didn’t target queer folks in Canada? It’s a question we pondered on in every of our evolving discussions, as it deserved significantly more nuance than what yes or no offer. We know the anecdotes exist, the frameworks that survive outside official records and as context within them. Drag and duty are no foreign concepts to each other, nor soldiers and sailors’ living identities found and entrenched in the porous spaces between regulations.
The paperwork persecution was systematic, from the cabinet table to the filing cabinets… …Folks were not yet a classified entry in a state database for denoting character weakness.
For the Canadian Armed Forces as a modern, unified institution, the act of purging of rainbow folks was a necessary thing to remove those vulnerable of being blackmailed while in the closet. And lesser honourable actors within the institution and the federal government had all the opportunity needed to practice othering openly and with prejudice. It was a calf-opening night endeavour. The purge was baked into the foundation of the post-war national security state, and it required a vast, multi-decade bureaucratic effort to manage the relentless, smouldering burn of its own logic.
The Purge was the construction of a bridge… turning stigma into security protocol.
That distinction is the critical chasm. On one side was personal risk mediated by social prejudice. On the other was state policy administered by impersonal bureaucracy. The Purge was the construction of a bridge across that chasm, turning stigma into security protocol. The first pillar of that bridge was poured from the fear of defection. Igor Gouzenko flipped in 1945, revealing the reality of Soviet spy rings within Canada. A legitimate panic led to a royal commission on the matter and to a new, powerful security apparatus. Initially, the target was political loyalty, rooting out communists and occasionally fascists too. But by the 1950s, the hunters needed a broader territory and the scope began to metastasize.
A cabinet directive on reliability of character meant a person could now be deemed unreliable if they had defects in their character, which may lead to indiscretion or dishonesty or may make them subjects of blackmail. The Cold War logic was chillingly elegant. A person with a secret could be turned by the enemy and therefore is the enemy. And so the RCMP’s Directorate of Security and Intelligence set up the Character Weakness Subdivision. They had the category, and now they could get to filling it based on accusation, suspicion, and confession. All deliberate choices, rather than an inevitable conclusion, as even then folks knew the homosexuals weren’t a legitimate security threat. Prejudice ratified by procedure.
The administrative prey was honed in on, and through a series of bureaucratic choices, homosexuality was linguistically and legally pulled out of the private and into the public realm and that of national security. It was official. The hunt was on.
Now, Nancy spoke about this in her own time in the forces. Without science, the government relied on pseudoscientific methods and applied quite a fun and dumb veneer to continue the hunt. I’d never seen it in my time, but we chatted on the wake of the fruit machine. As if from AcmeCo, the device attempted to detect homosexuality by measuring physiological responses to erotic imagery. Though a failure, its use persisted for years as a dehumanizing piece of an expensive obsession.
Those sanctioned practices and many others in callous disregard for the dignity, privacy, and humanity of its victims would continue for decades, drawing a lot of parties into its wake. People became lists. A campaign of surveillance blurred the lines of state security and moral policing. They gathered, they raided, they compelled in the style of espionage for the sake of purging. They brought civil servants, they uniformed, even private citizens out of the category of human and onto the roll call for condemnation. No longer a servant of Canada, they became personnel issues and security flaws to be dealt with, clearances revoked, careers terminated, pensions often forfeited, turned into a number in emotionless, efficient, state-sanctioned acts of bigotry.
But all dumb science and policies fall in their own time, and the purge was no different. In 1992, on the eve of being sued by an exemplary officer named Michelle Douglas, who was honorably discharged due to her sexual orientation in 1989, the Feds abandoned their policy. Canada took a shift for the better. Canada stopped purging folks, but they also stopped talking about it and its wake. No apology, no compensation, no reckoning or reconciliation for the thousands of lives shattered. But after another lawsuit, decades later on behalf of over 9,000 people, a settlement was reached. The bureaucracy of harm was replaced with a bureaucracy of complication—payouts, paperwork, with a final agreement and various supplementary agreements thereafter.
Nancy spoke about the apologies and the follow-up from the dry bureaucratic witch hunt and calling it off. Conversations shifted towards what a bureaucracy of repair looks like and what one of reconciling and emboldening needs ahead of taking root. This is the frontier space that good, humble, honourable folks like Michelle and Nancy occupy.
Now, Nancy was appointed to the Veterans Review and Appeals Board in 2020, a former CAF military police master corporal, a recipient of the Canada Pride Citation. She is a veteran of the institution’s culture and a survivor of its policies. She hasn’t made herself to be a symbol or figurehead, but her priorities, they seem to be pragmatic steps to building through the mess into a better tomorrow, while showing up folks caught in the in-between | Read her bio.
Our conversations were far from abstract. We talked about memorials, not just the planning for the national monument destined for Ottawa’s landscape, but of the kind that forced daily reflection and renewal. We talked about the Stolperstein of Germany, the Our Lady of Lourdes of Tuktoyaktuk, and other memorials in daily life of somber nature around the globe. We talked of how legacies can be kept not just in museums, but in messes, offices, drill halls, and the regular spaces of military institutions as tools of intrusive cultural awareness. It was a treat to hear her perspectives and experiences, as Nancy’s regular work, formal and informal, is that intentional, granular action that gets stuff done. Bridging people to tools, next steps, and recourse.
That kind of ethos forged through time in and out of uniform pivots on a critical distinction. Folks like Nancy ensure people are heard, not just processed or managed. In the labyrinthine federal system, folks like her are the antithesis of the purge’s logic based itself on the refusal of seeing or hearing the humanity of those in the purging hopper, whoever they may be.
The institution that spent decades systematically purging a segment of its own population now faces an existential need to grow from that very pool.
The reflection on memory and methods collides with a brutal contemporary reality. The CAF, and Canada, is in a state of crisis, desperately short for personnel in a world where global security is degrading and traditional alliances are straining. The institution that spent decades systematically purging a segment of its own population now faces an existential need to grow from that very pool. Conversations of moral redress, historical justice, and even cultural repair are important, but with danger on Canada’s doorstep from abroad, this dark talk of strategic necessity is a necessity. The Purge was an epic, decades-long act of national self-sabotage, wasting strategic human capital and decades of lost potential thereafter.
Talking with Nancy, purge survivors, as well as young queer folk in and out of service, it looks like monumental tasks still lay ahead. If we can grow internal competence of all sorts of diverse Canadian lifestyles, operational use of memory to benefit and grow perspectives, and to have veterans’ machinery which can follow dignity in service with dignity post-service, Canada will gain access to a profound labour pool. The force multiplier of open perspectives with diversity as a norm becomes operational strength, and it strengthens through known and intentional reconciliation, informed by and giving out empowerment.
Nancy’s path shows the way. Less malice, more willingness. It is the quiet, granular work of listening in good years and not-so-good years, of bridging communities to recourse, case by case, person by person. It is a long-haul attitude, one that finds love and lives life while steadfastly repairing institutions from within and all around. It’s pragmatic determination that pays off, especially when allies listen and when they enable their allies. The final page of the paper trail is not yet written. It waits to be composed by their service.
The Queer in Treaty 7 podcast is a call to action from the Albertan Queer Affirmation Review, an ongoing work by community curated by Cupola Policy and Strategy. You can find more, read more, and hear more through this sub-stack and more on policy science inclusion efforts at CupolaStrategy.com.
Thank you for sharing your time and for entrenching Treaty and the Treaty Queer.
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