Darkness under the rainbow Exhibit explores Canada’s purge of LGBTTQ+ members of federal workforce By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 4:30 PM CST Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2025

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This article was published 29/01/2025 (589 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Michelle Douglas was in her early 20s when she joined the Canadian Armed Forces in 1986, a young woman ready to serve her country.

Initially, she thrived. She was at the top of her class. She could see herself rising through the ranks. She also fell in love for the first time, with a fellow officer.

But what should have been a happy time in her life quickly curdled. Douglas was investigated, interrogated, subjected to a polygraph exam and ultimately fired.

Her crime? Being lesbian.

“The military police gave me 24 hours to come out to my family, or they said they’d send the police to do it,” she recalls.

But Douglas fought back. In 1992, she took the CAF to court, using the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to argue her case — and won.

Her landmark case resulted in the military ending its formal ban on LGBTTQ+ service members and full rank being restored to those who had been disciplined under this discriminatory policy.

Douglas’s story is one of many included in Love in a Dangerous Time: Canada’s LGBT Purge, a new large-scale exhibition opening Friday at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights that explores a dark chapter in Canada’s recent past.

From the 1950s to the 1990s, the Government of Canada systematically investigated, harassed and fired more than 9,000 LGBTTQ+ members of the Canadian Armed Forces, the RCMP and the federal public service in what would become one of the longest-running, largest-scale workplace violations of human rights in Canadian history.

“I think it’s a very powerful exhibit,” says Douglas, who is now the executive director of the LGBT Purge Fund and who was in Winnipeg seeing it for the first time this week.

“Very beautiful as well, and poignant for me. I see a lot of young faces of people I know now 30-plus years on. I see them in there and imagine the journey they’ve been through.”

Scott de Groot, lead curator of Love in a Dangerous Time, says that although the Purge has been well documented and studied, many Canadians are still unaware that this is a part of our history.

“A big part of the objective of the exhibition is to disseminate knowledge of the Purge, to build awareness that this happened for so many decades and involved so many people,” de Groot says. “We are really happy to have the trust of Purge survivors to tell their stories through this exhibition.”

Telling those stories required some creativity on the part of the museum.

“We weren’t able to go to another museum or a major lending institution to obtain a lot of the objects and artifacts that we wanted to be a big part of the show, so we had to reach out to Purge survivors, community members, access personal collections and local archives,” de Groot says.

The exhibition has plenty of immersive and interactive elements, including a replica interrogation room that features audio clips of survivor oral histories and a generative AI-powered display that allows you to “talk” to survivors and activists, whose insights and reflections are triggered when visitors ask questions.

“We wanted to present information in a variety of different ways, so artwork has also been a big part of this show, both paintings that are interspersed throughout the gallery and also work that we’ve commissioned,” de Groot says.

The first of those commissions is The Regulation of Desire, a video installation by Winnipeg filmmaker Noam Gonick in collaboration with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. This contemporary dance work, choreographed by Freya Björg Olafson, is a seven-part exploration of different facets of the Purge.

The film takes its title from a groundbreaking book by Canadian sociologist Gary Kinsman, who happened to be a professor of Gonick’s.

“I don’t know how many academics get to have their books turned into ballets,” the Hey, Happy! director says.

When the CMHR approached Gonick about doing a film for the exhibit, he immediately thought of dance.

“The crimes of the Purge were all crimes of the body and crimes of desire and flesh and so, of all mediums, I think dance is really the one to tell that tale, because these are DNA urges that lead to purges,” Gonick says.

The piece is not strictly ballet. In addition to the cast of RWB company members — “a very open-minded, pro-art group of dancers,” Gonick says — The Regulation of Desire also features dancer (and Gonick’s partner) Michael Walker performing burlesque pole dance.

“To be able to also do the art of pole dancing really meant a lot because, ultimately, the whole genre of pole dancing stems from our queer history — from burlesque dancing to go-go boys and underground bars,” Walker says. “And really, pole dancing celebrates our longing for desire and the body.”

The second commission is The Fruit Machine: A Space Opera, a video installation by Winnipeg performance artists Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan. It takes its name from the offensive colloquialism given to a government-funded battery of “psychological tests” meant to determine one’s sexual orientation in the 1960s.

Some of these tests included showing people erotic images and attempting to measure pupil dilation, or asking true-or-false questions to determine how masculine or feminine someone was. Sample questions: “I like mechanics magazines, T or F”, or “I think I would like the work of a dress designer, T or F.”

“A lot of our work has looked at the absurdity of oppression, the absurdity of misogyny, the absurdity of homophobia,” Dempsey says. “The Fruit Machine was really an ultimate expression of that, the idea that the Canadian government could — could and should — fund a testing device for homosexuality in an effort to excise homosexuality from the public sphere.

“It’s a fascinating and horrible part of history that Canadians aren’t aware of and should be aware of.”

“It’s a fascinating and horrible part of history that Canadians aren’t aware of and should be aware of.”–Shawna Dempsey

Dempsey and Millan flip the idea of the Fruit Machine on its ear, and showcase instead the images that advertising and pop-culture of that era, beamed into living rooms from TV screens, that reinforced the idea that heterosexuality and a rigid pink-is-for-girls, blue-is-for-boys gender binary were not only “normal” and “good” but the passport to happiness.

“As we thought about it, we realize it’s part of a larger, more pervasive kind of oppression that is exercised by popular culture,” Millan adds.

“And so we really tried to figure out how to talk about this without just saying, ‘Look at this absurd machine.’ We wanted to talk about it as part of a larger, systemic, cultural-wide way of controlling populations. And then we further thought, Well, when does this start? It starts as a child.”

The stories told in Love in a Dangerous Time are harrowing and painful, but the exhibition also tells a story of joy and resistance.

Following Douglas’s historic victory in the 1990s, other Purge survivors stepped forward and launched a class-action lawsuit in 2016 that resulted in a $145-million settlement and an official apology from the Government of Canada.

The settlement included funds for legacy projects to honour those who did not live long enough to receive compensation. One of those projects is this exhibition.

“That’s been a principle for me as curator, balancing attention to trauma and discrimination and loss with stories of courage, resistance, collective action and ultimately dismantling the Purge,” de Groot says.

“We won. That is one of the takeaways here, too.”

“I’m very worried about the prospect of it happening again. But I think anyone who sees this exhibit will know what an injustice it was, how wrong it was then, how wrong it would be today.”–Michelle Douglas

But there’s also an uncomfortable timeliness about the darker elements of the exhibition, too, as U.S. President Donald Trump issues executive orders that will do away with federal programs for transgender people and ban them from serving in the military.

“I want people to experience this and learn about Canadian history, one that’s not taught, and to imagine the context of the Purge in today’s world, because the prospect of more purges is still alive,” Douglas says.

“Certainly, we’re seeing it in the United States, and it can happen in Canada if we don’t stand up for ourselves and others. I’m very worried about the prospect of it happening again. But I think anyone who sees this exhibit will know what an injustice it was, how wrong it was then, how wrong it would be today.”

“We’re thrilled to be part of this exhibition, because it tells the truth,” Dempsey says.

“It reveals an ugly past the Canadian government perpetrated against its own people, and only when we learn our history and learn the truth can we proceed with empathy into the future.”

Love in a Dangerous Time: Canada’s LGBT Purge will be on view until early 2026, after which it will tour.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com