From Sodomy Laws to Same-Sex Marriage by Sean Brady;Mark Seymour;

Author:Sean Brady;Mark Seymour;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

10

The Sexual (Geo)Politics of Loyalty: Homosexuality and Emotion in Cold War Security Policy

Kate Davison

It is no secret that the biggest concentration of homosexuals can be found in the diplomatic services of Western countries. […] The Soviet Intelligence officers were amazed at the sense of mutual consideration and true loyalty among homosexuals.

Alexander Orlov, Handbook of Intelligence and Guerrilla Warfare, 19631

On September 12, 1962, British civil servant John William Vassall was arrested in London and charged under the Official Secrets Act. In 1954 while on assignment to Moscow, Vassall had become drunk at a party, was photographed in “a homosexual orgy,” and subsequently blackmailed into spying for the Soviet Union.2 On October 22, 1962 (the same day that news of the Cuban missile crisis broke), he was sentenced to eighteen years in prison, and branded a traitor. This breach of national security was an embarrassment for the conservative Macmillan government. After a decade of positive security vetting in staff recruitment, how had they failed to detect his sexual perversion? The report of the investigative tribunal, released on April 25, 1963, found that “there was nothing either in Vassall’s conduct or conversation that indicated even to a sharp observer a man addicted to homosexual practices.”3 The problem of inadequate detection methods was seized upon by the Sunday Mirror, which published a contemptuous how-to guide for the Admiralty, Foreign Office, and MI5 under the heading “How to Spot a Possible Homo.”4 “They are everywhere,” the article panicked, “and they can be anybody.” Had Vassall’s sexuality and his “vain and greedy” demeanor been detected, went the narrative, so would his likely betrayal have been.

Vassall was by no means the only person to have spied for the Soviet Union, but around the globe, the particular circumstance of his case—that is, his homosexuality—lent renewed fervor to hard questions about whether traitorous behavior could be predicted in sexual orientation, following earlier revelations and public profiling of the bi- and homosexual orientations of the Cambridge defectors Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. It symbolically reflected anxious concerns in this period within both government administration and medical science around how homosexuality and homosexual behavior could be detected, determined, and handled or treated—especially among psychiatrists influenced by behaviorism—and, indeed, whether the Communists were better at it.5

This chapter analyzes how homosexuality as a Cold War issue extended beyond the Anglophone world and across the so-called iron curtain. Because the “homosexual” seemed to fit unnoticed into society more easily than other “deviants,” invisibility and detection became direct concerns for security agencies—indeed, the entire spying apparatus was built upon disguise, deception, and the ability to assimilate unnoticed. Security and intelligence agencies sought expert advice, at first from psychiatrists and medical professionals, but later, influenced by behaviorism, firsthand observation of homosexuals’ emotional behavior and motivations.

We know from the work of David K. Johnson, Patrick Higgins, and Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile, among others, that the phenomenon of pursuing anti-homosexual policies in connection with national security was a trend common across Anglophone countries in the postwar decades

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