A SERGE OF PRIDE
Ottawa’s historic apology to LGBTQ Canadians marked bittersweet moment for one RCMP family
OTTAWA— Const. Elenore Sturko donned her finest RCMP red serge uniform on Nov. 28 and went with her wife, Melissa, to witness what she knew would be a historic event.
In a drill hall full of military personnel, supporters and activists, she listened to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s nationally televised apology to LGBTQ2 people, projected onto a big video screen.
She was excited to be there as a lesbian, a proud Mountie, a member of a family that has long revered the RCMP and as the great-niece of Sgt. R.D. Van Norman.
Her late great-uncle Dave was one of four brothers from Manitoba who joined the country’s national police force as young men — the first time four brothers had ever served together in the RCMP’s history.
The faces of Dave, Brian, Bob and Jack in four framed photos hanging on her great-grandmother’s wall had steeped in her a sense of awe in the RCMP growing up. “Uncle Dave” was the eldest, and graduated from the RCMP’s Regina training academy in 1947, when he was 19. “I remember thinking these were probably the coolest people I’d ever seen in my life,” Sturko said. The admiration her grandmother had for her brothers kindled Sturko’s own passion to join the national police force (though it took her two tries). “They were her heroes, too,” Sturko said. Sturko, 42, has a big, open smile and radiates positive energy. She’s a walking recruitment ad for the RCMP. Her blue eyes twinkle as she says, “When I came out of the closet, I never looked back.”
But her great-uncle’s experience was vastly different. Sgt. Dave Van Norman’s 17-year career ended abruptly when he was forced to resign in 1964, one of an untold number of Mounties hounded out of the force as part of what Justin Trudeau called a purge of people suspected of being gay or lesbian in Canada’s public service, military, intelligence and police services.
The RCMP claims it has no reliable data on the number of members who were affected. Spokesperson Sgt. Harold Pfleiderer said there was no formal policy to purge LGBTQ members, but added “there can be no doubt that discrimination played a role in members leaving the RCMP in the past.”
Douglas Elliott, the lawyer in the class-action lawsuit that led to a $145-million settlement and Trudeau’s apology, begs to differ.
He said it is clear the RCMP had an unofficial policy of driving out gay and lesbian members that was officially endorsed by cabinet in 1963. “They operated the purge for many years and used to send undercover agents to the bars at the Lord Elgin Hotel looking for gays” in Ottawa, Elliott said.
While the RCMP, unlike the Canadian Armed Forces, didn’t use a special discharge code when it ousted gays from its ranks, Elliott said the class action counts RCMP members among its plaintiffs, and the numbers will likely grow as more Mounties or their families come forward.
The prime minister said that from the 1950s to the early 1990s, the government of Canada “exercised its authority in a cruel and unjust manner, undertaking a campaign of oppression against members, and suspected members, of the LGBTQ2 communities.”
It was an era when the Criminal Code prohibited consensual sex between men, and gays and lesbians were deemed a security threat open to blackmail because of their sexual orientation.
“What resulted was nothing short of a witch hunt,” Trudeau told a hushed Commons, as many, including Elliott, watched, crying in the gallery.
Sturko knows only the broad brush strokes of her Uncle Dave’s story, especially that he loved the Mounties.
After graduation, he was briefly posted to Regina’s crime lab, then to Swift Current, Sask. Next came a se- ries of postings in the eastern Arctic, Pond Inlet, Nunavut, on the northern tip of Baffin Island, Iqaluit, Nunavut, (then known as Frobisher Bay), Fort Smith, N.W.T., and then to “G” Division headquarters in Yellowknife, N.W.T. Van Norman loved working and travelling among the Inuit. He learned to speak Inuktitut, had a small collection of soapstone carvings, wrote an in-depth series on northern life for the RCMP Quarterly magazine, which, however dated in its descriptions, expressed respect for Inuit culture and pride in his RCMP work. He was awarded the Queen’s Coronation Medal in 1953 for his work on the Distant Early Warning line of radar stations in the north.
Suddenly, in1964, Van Norman was “told he could resign or be fired,” Sturko said.
His service card says only that he was discharged. It was a tactic of the purge.
“No option is a good option for you. You were either fired in disgrace or you quit in disgrace,” Sturko said.
Dave Van Norman’s life became difficult after that. He was only 36, and didn’t have his pension. Sturko doesn’t know whether he had to forfeit it, or whether he was offered an option to buy it out but couldn’t afford to. She does know the personal impact was profound.
“He was essentially outed to his family,” Sturko said, a choice Van Norman may never have wanted to make. “Maybe it’s something he would have kept as a lifelong secret.”
His father didn’t really talk to him after that, Sturko quietly added.
In 1964, Life magazine dubbed San Francisco “the gay capital of America.”
But Van Norman did not find peace there. Sturko said he was brutally attacked “for being gay” while living there, nearly dying of his injuries. He moved to Houston, Texas, and returned to Canada in the late 1980s, where he died at home under the care of his mother and sister on April 28, 1988. He was 60 years old.
Sturko contacted her family members to tell them she was going to go to Parliament Hill, not to accept Trudeau’s apology — “It’s not for me to accept” — but simply to listen. Van Norman’s two surviving brothers told her Dave would have accepted it in a heartbeat. A “sweet person” who was “extremely proud” of his service, he never said a bad word about the RCMP after he left it.
Still, Sturko said, she wasn’t expecting the wave of emotion that day.
She and her wife, Melissa, had had lunch at the parliamentary restaurant with their Eastern Ontario MP, meeting along the way another lesbian couple who had been in the military, dining with their MP, too. They shared stories, and when there was no room in the public galleries of the House of Commons, they went to the Cartier Square drill hall to watch Trudeau on oversized video screens.
Among the soldiers, supporters, allies and advocates, Sturko was the only person in a red RCMP regimental uniform.
“I was just listening,” she said. “I didn’t feel emotional or anything. I was wondering would I feel sad for my uncle, but I actually felt nothing. And then when Prime Minister Trudeau started talking about the ‘fruit machine,’ I felt like I was socked in the gut, the wind knocked out of my sails.” The Canadian government had funded “an absurd device known as the “fruit machine” — a failed technology that was supposed to measure homosexual attraction,” Trudeau said.
The series of psychological tests was designed to expose people to images and measure biological responses such as pupil dilation. It was never put into operation, yet it has become a symbol of that dark chapter for which Trudeau publicly expressed “shame and sorrow and deep regret” on behalf of the government of Canada.
As Trudeau vividly described interrogations, polygraphs, surveillance, discrimination and stigma visited upon individuals who had wanted only to serve their country, Sturko was moved to tears by “the cruelty of it all.”
She wondered about her uncle. “I wondered who did my uncle love. Was there somebody in his life? That came into my mind.”
That day, RCMP interim commissioner Dan Dubeau, who attended the apology in Parliament, took her by the arm. “I want you to know that on behalf of the RCMP, I’m really sorry that happened to your family,” he said.
It was a nice gesture, Sturko said, and one that she “really appreciated.”