Gay spies. A very camp but real idea, and has been for decades now. Here, we explore that history. LGBTQ+ people are everywhere and have done every job.

There has reportedly been a large number of gay spies in MI5, the UK’s Security Service. In 2016, the agency was named one of the best places for LGBTQ+ people to work by Stonewall.

However, there was a ban on openly gay people working in the MI5, MI6 and GCHQ up until 1991, even though homosexuality had been legal since 1967. They were seen as vulnerable, easy to honeytrap and blackmail, even though the same would happen to the heterosexual spies. However, the Guardian’s former security editor Richard Norton-Taylor suggested that forcing queer people to hide their sexualities made them even better spies: “They could keep secrets, and tell lies,” he said.

The ban also affected the Foreign Office. Richard Wood, who joined the diplomatic service six weeks before the ban was lifted in 1991, explained, “I was outed to security department by colleagues while on my first posting, then put on the next flight home and told to expect dismissal. I was allowed to stay, but the price was heavy: a list of family and friends I was forced to come out to; a pink tag attached to my personnel file, and years of resentment and fear.”

The BBC also quoted a former officer as saying, “Throughout the 90s, there were direct discriminatory impacts on families and partners, allowances, pensions, promotion, career management and postings. Homophobia was never acknowledged but it could be concealed, even to the point of records being modified to hide it.”

However, this didn’t stop queer people from being spies. The ban did, however, cause many of them to lead a double or even a triple life: the life of a spy, the life of a gay person and a person who is hiding their identity and career from their friends and family.

 

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A past chief of MI6 was a gay man named Maurice Oldfield. A chief in the ’70s, Oldfield went on to become a security and intelligence coordinator to the prime minister. He had his security clearance revoked soon before he died in 1981, as the truth of his sexuality had come out.

There were also gay spies outside the MI5 and MI6. In the Cambridge Five, a British spy ring that passed information to the Soviet Union, there were two gay members, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, and a third, Donald MacLean, who was bisexual.

In 2016, the GCHQ director apologised for the discrimination faced by LGBTQ+ people. In 2020, the MI5 director also apologised, as did the director of MI6 in 2021.

LGBTQ+ people from these agencies say that they are now more inclusive, while some former officers do not understand why it has taken them so long.