How Canada Tried To Purge Its Queers
Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile want to launch their book The Canadian War on Queers at Ottawa’s Lord Elgin Hotel in March. It’s there, Kinsman says, that gay men began to turn the tables on RCMP surveillance officers taking photos from behind newspapers.
Kinsman and Gentile’s new book documents the government security apparatus used to root out gays and lesbians from Canada’s military and civil service starting in the 1950s, as the world emerged from World War II and the Cold War began.
In their research, Kinsman and Gentile found repeated tales of surveillance, illegal searches, interrogations and attempts at blackmail by police who attempted to force queers to out others so they could be targeted as well.
The state decided that gays and lesbians had character defects that made them susceptible to communist infiltration, Kinsman and Gentile discovered in official documents and interviews.
In short, the Canadian government decided that queers could not be trusted.
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