Canada apologizes for its "Lavender Scare"

The report in today's Washington Post that Canada will build a monument in honor of the victims of that country's Cold War "gay purge" (which ended in 1992) immediately called to mind David K. Johnson's pioneering book, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government, which we discussed in April 2012. (Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's address to Parliament formally apologizing for that history is well worth watching in its own right, by the way.)

Johnson briefly alludes to that history in this passage (pp. 143-144):

"The British, Canadian and Australian security agencies had all studied and copied, to varying degrees, the antigay policies and investigative procedures developed by the United States government. Whether or not they subscribed to the same beliefs about homosexuals, each feared that the disclosure that one of their secret agencies employed a homosexual would jeopardize their close relationship with American intelligence officials. When Canadian officials discovered a homosexual working in a highly secret agency monitoring radio signals from the Soviet Union in 1992, they immediately sought his resignation. As a Canadian intelligence expert explained, 'If countries like Canada did not conform to American standards of security, they risked being cut off from America's intelligence-gathering apparatus. Once the model for the rest of the federal government, the State Department's antigay policies and procedures had become the model for much of the NATO alliance.'"