Wayne Davis was on an upward trajectory at the RCMP.

He joined the Mounties at just 20 years old in 1967. Being on the force took him across the country and he moved up the ranks, eventually landing a role in charge of finance for the RCMP in their admin office in Toronto.

But all that changed in 1985 when his boss called him into his office for a chat.

“He says, ‘You were seen in a gay bar on the weekend, why were you in a gay bar?’” Davis said, reflecting back.

Davis didn’t think there was anything wrong with the question. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was put in place earlier that year, and being part of the 2SLGBTQ+ community was decriminalized in 1969.

“So I said, ‘Well, I was in a gay bar because I’m gay,’” he said. “The closet is a very tight space and I’d been in it for many years and it was like, ‘Oh good, I can throw this door open at last,’ thinking I [could] still have my career.”

That moment of truth led Davis to his dismissal, with his boss giving him the option to either resign or be fired, and pack up his belongings by 4 p.m. He resigned. 

“It was very surreal,” he said. “I was devastated, angry, upset.”

But Davis wasn’t alone. The Vancouver resident was one of the roughly 9,000 people impacted by the LGBT Purge, where people from the 2SLGBTQ+ community in the Canadian Armed Forces, RCMP and federal public service were investigated, harassed and fired through discriminatory policies and practices due to their sexuality between the 1950s to 1990s.

Davis is sharing his story as part of a larger exhibition coming to the West Vancouver Memorial Library called Love in a Dangerous Time: Canada’s LGBT Purge.

The exhibition was originally put together by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. The self-guided exhibit will be in the West Van library’s main hall, where visitors can learn the history behind the purge and take in first-hand experiences of those involved through 12 visual panels and an audio component.

“The LGBT Purge is an important part of Canadian human rights and workplace history, but not many people know about it,” said Kailash Srinivasan, head of communications at the West Vancouver library. “By hosting this exhibition, we are hoping that the community learns about this chapter and has the space to reflect on it.”

Queer Canadians were falsely constructed as a threat to national security, stemming from concerns in the Cold War, said Scott de Groot, curator of the exhibition in Winnipeg.

However survivors fought back. The exhibit also focuses on the activism and resistance of those who battled against those policies.

“Queer Canadians didn’t simply accept what was happening to them,” de Groot said. “This history is not just one of suffering and injustice but also extraordinary courage, resistance and collective action.”

In 2016, a nation-wide class action lawsuit was filed against the Canadian government, with a $145-million settlement reached in 2018. A non-profit called LGBT Purge Fund was created to distribute funds from the settlement. Then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau formally apologized for the purge in 2017.

Davis has been a board member for the LGBT Purge Fund for the last eight years and does talks at schools, churches and conferences sharing his experience. He tells his story to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself, he said. Davis will share his experience at the West Vancouver library Aug. 5. And if there’s anything Davis wants to emphasize, it’s that knowledge is power.

“And to hopefully make people into reactors,” he said. “We want to make sure people are aware and everybody should have a little bit of support and allyship in them because that’s very important to making sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Love in a Dangerous Time: Canada’s LGBT Purge is running at the West Vancouver Memorial Library from July 31 to Sept. 15.

Abby Luciano is the Indigenous and civic affairs reporter for the North Shore News. This reporting beat is made possible by the Local Journalism Initiative.