Miss Civil Service and the fruit machine

By Nicole Findlay

In the 1940s a scandal involving the top echelon of England’s parliament rocked the nation and had a ripple effect on North American national security policies. In Canada, it led to a top secret campaign that resulted in demotions and dismissals of targeted federal public servants.

Patrizia Gentile, assistant professor, PJIWGS and Gary Kinsman, professor of sociology, Laurentian University, have spent the past decade sifting through declassified government documents that record the purging of homosexuals from government ranks. The result is The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation.

As WWII drew to an end, and gave rise to the Cold War, the British and American governments classified homosexuality as a threat to national security. In a case referred to as the Cambridge Five, the British government discovered some of its top officials were communist informants.

When one of these men was later found to be gay, all homosexuals were deemed to be disloyal, subversive and vulnerable to blackmail.

In compliance with British and American national security policies, Canada began a campaign to purge homosexuals from the civil service.

“The directives to vet homosexuals came from the Security Panel, an interdepartmental advisory body that comprised top civil servants and the Secretary of the Privy Council which reported to the Cabinet throughout the Cold War period,” explains Gentile. This secret campaign would occupy the Prime Minister’s Office, Cabinet and the RCMP for the next four decades.

The RCMP identified suspected homosexuals through surveillance, entrapment, park sweeps, and interrogations. Victims were classified into one of three categories – suspected homosexual, alleged homosexual, and confirmed homosexual.  However, the top secret campaign never leveled charges of homosexuality against its victims. Instead they were denied the security clearances necessary to advancement in the federal government, which would ultimately result in demotion or dismissal.

According to Gentile and Kinsman, approximately 9,000 people were victimized in the purge. This number does not take into account the secondary victims – spouses and children who were also affected. 

Gentile’s research of declassified government documents has not unearthed any evidence that any of these “confirmed homosexuals” had ever been blackmailed into providing national secrets to Canada’s enemies.

Despite the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1969 which de-criminalized homosexuality and led Pierre Trudeau to famously declare, “the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation,” the Canadian government continued to take an active interest in its citizen’s private lives.  Gay activist groups, feminists and leftists organizations also came under watch.

The Carleton Connection

In 1961, the RCMP acknowledged that they didn’t have enough manpower to conduct the investigations. They commissioned Carleton University psychology professor, Frank Robert Wake to develop a test to quickly identify homosexuality.

Subjects were given word association and multiple choice tests, shown a series of images while attached to a machine that measured the degree to which their palms sweat, and a camera that captured retinas dilating in response to pictures. 

Wake referred to these tests as his “special project.” The RCMP preferred the more flamboyant term – the fruit machine. The tests proved unreliable and the special project folded in 1963.

Reinstating traditional gender roles

Although Gentile traces her interest in the topic back to her MA research, she focused her thesis on the opposite face of the gender anxiety coin. 

During the 1950s the federal service was expanding and, hoping to lure rural, young women to the city and a job in the government, developed a unique recruitment strategy. 

Women from governmental departments were selected to compete in beauty contests with winners selected at branch picnics. From these contestants, “Miss Civil Service” was crowned.

These “government girls” were the pinnacle of what young women should aspire to – young, professional, beautiful.

The contests not only provided a training ground to bolster femininity, they were morale boosters that departmental colleagues could rally behind.

The beauty pageants served a darker agenda, contends Gentile. They were meant to reinforce the traditional nuclear family in the post-war period. Women, who had previously held down the fort while the men went off to war, were encouraged to return to more traditional gender roles once the men returned. Social order had to be reinstated. The cold war was just beginning and feminism was viewed as a subversive and threatening element to Canada’s social fabric.

In the interest of national security

The Canadian War on Queers traces the trajectory of these federally sponsored campaigns against perceived threats to national security. Kinsman and Gentile also analyze 1920s campaigns aimed at communists and unionists, the internment of the Japanese during WWII, the attempts to assimilate Aboriginal Peoples through residential schools. The authors argue that the “othering” of groups in the name of national security continues although the faces have changed. The most recent example, Gentile points to, is the singling out of Islam and the War on Terror.