August 21, 2026 by Wilbur Turner, President and Executive Director, Advocacy Canada.
Featured image: Michelle Douglas, Executive Director of the LGBT Purge Fund speaking at the opening ceremony of the Thunderhead Monument on August 21, 2026.
Did you know that from the mid-1950s to the 1990s the Canadian government systematically hunted, harassed, and fired members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community who worked in the Canadian Armed Forces, the RCMP, and the federal public service? Over 9,000 personnel were investigated in what is now called the LGBT Purge. Today, a monument dedicated to this story was officially opened in Ottawa. It is called the Thunderhead Monument. I watched the livestream with a lump in my throat as stories of courage, resiliency, determination, and celebration unfolded. The monument is situated on unceded Anishinabe Algonquin territory along the banks of the Ottawa River and steps from the institutions that caused the harm.
The structure is a striking white concrete column, roughly nine metres high, hollowed out in the shape of a thundercloud. It is lined with thousands of mirrored disco ball tiles that glow at night. The design was created by a Winnipeg-based team led by Liz Wreford, Peter Sampson, and Taylor LaRocque of Public City, with artists Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, and Albert McLeod, an Indigenous and Two-Spirit subject-matter expert and advisor. The proposal draws on the symbolism of a thunderhead cloud, which embodies the strength, activism, and hope of 2SLGBTQIA+ communities. The site also includes a healing circle with stones chosen by Two-Spirit Elders, a fruit orchard, a medicinal garden, narrative walls telling the story of the LGBT Purge, and a tribute basin.
In 2016 a class action against the Attorney General of Canada was brought by three representative plaintiffs, Todd Ross, Martine Roy, and Alida Satalic, was filed in the fall of 2016 in Ontario, Quebec, and shortly after in Nova Scotia, then refiled in March 2017 in the Federal Court as the LGBT Purge Class Action. An official apology and settlement followed shortly thereafter. A settlement was announced on November 28, 2017, alongside the Prime Minister’s apology in the House of Commons. The Federal Court approved the Final Settlement Agreement on June 22, 2018. The settlement totalled up to $145 million, with up to $110 million set aside for individual compensation and up to $15 million earmarked specifically for recognition and memorialization, including the monument, a permanent exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, retention of records related to the purge, and improved training on 2SLGBTQIA+ inclusion across the federal government. The LGBT Purge Fund came about as a result and developed the park and the monument in collaboration with the Department of Canadian Heritage and the National Capital Commission.
Per government figures, 719 people joined the class action, made up of 629 from the military, 78 public servants, and 12 from the RCMP.
Thirty four years ago, Michelle Douglas won a significant legal victory that helped set the stage for the reckoning to come. She had been discharged from the military in 1989 for being gay. Her charter challenge against the military ended the military’s ban on gays and lesbians serving in the armed forces. Douglas is now the executive director of the LGBT Purge Fund.
Survivors being recognized by the Thunderhead Monument aren’t limited to those impacted by the LGBT Purge. Discrimination against people with diverse sexual and gender identity arrived with white settlers. The Purge didn’t happen in isolation. It was part of systemic discrimination against the 2SLGBTQIA+ community that was largely normalized in society, and it started long before the 1950s. According to the Thunderhead project, colonial institutions and Christianity worked to suppress and erase Indigenous sexuality, gender norms, and spirituality. Residential schools created a cover and justification for this cultural erasure, and its impact is understood today through survivor stories. Ma-Nee, a Two-Spirit Ojibwa-Cree Elder, has spoken about being told by her grandmother that Two-Spirit people were once regarded as special among her people, seven generations back, and that only later were they told they were nobody unless they joined settler society.
The inaugural ceremony was attended by Governor General Louise Arbour, alongside Minister Rechie Valdez, former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe, joined by survivors and their families. In a light-hearted moment hosts Jezebel Bardot and Carolyn Taylor referred to Trudeau as Katy Perry’s boyfriend. Elder Claudette Commanda commenced the proceedings by welcoming attendees to Algonquin territory, “What’s important is we are all here together, gathered with one heart, with one mind, with one spirit and one voice.”
Michelle Douglas, executive director of the LGBT Purge Fund, spoke after the land welcome. Addressing the assembled supporters, she confessed that the reality of such a memorial once seemed impossible. “As a young lesbian military officer in the late 1980s and early 1990s, fighting hard with others to end the military’s policy of discrimination through a legal battle, I literally never imagined that such a beautiful, visible, sparkly, and inspirational monument would stand here,” she said. Speaking to those who worked to bring the monument to life Douglas said it was “Not only to mark the LGBT Purge, but to tell a much bigger story of the 2SLGBTQI community, our journeys of pain, but also of joy, love and resilience.”
As she invited them to be recognized, many survivors stood or raised their hands while she also paused to honour the memory of those who passed away before this historic unveiling.
Next, writer and performer Ivan Coyote took the stage. They shared “A thunderhead is a dynamic cloud of unstoppable energy.” Coyote said that this monument stands for people who died before the nation could restore what was unjustly taken from them: their dignity, their privacy, the careers they cherished, and the means to provide for their loved ones. They said, “We gather today to speak their names in cement and tell their stories and raise our fists in the air with a promise meant for them, but carried forward from here today and held safe and seen in our own hearts and hands.” Coyote also stated that the safer, more compassionate world we should be celebrating remains out of reach, especially as movements against 2SLGBTQIA+ rights intensify again around the world. They called Thunderhead the queerest monument in the world.
Todd Ross and Martine Roy, co-chairs of the LGBT Purge Fund and both plaintiffs in the original class action, stood together at the podium to share remarks. Ross told the audience about the idea to extend the monument to represent more than just purge survivors, “Douglas Elliott, our lead lawyer, suggested we create a monument for all 2SLGBTQI Canadians. This monument is a gift from purge survivors, paid for from the funds that would have gone to those who are no longer with us.” Roy and Ross thanked the sailors, aviators, soldiers, RCMP members, and federal civil servants who were swept up in the purge and had to live in hiding, along with the activists, lawyers, and educators who carried the fight forward over decades.
Reading through the stories of survivors on the Thunderhead Monument website and listening to the speakers at the ceremony brought back memories of my own experience of hiding who I was while I navigated my career and life in the church in the late 1970s through the 1990s. I wasn’t hunted or targeted by employers but always carried a deep concern about being “found out.” This monument carries stories and significance for all of us who share this lived experience.
Thunderhead stands as an acknowledgment of decades of resistance and a major turning point in the history of human rights for 2SLGBTQIA+ people in Canada. It is also a reminder to future generations of the work queer elders did to get us here.
