The shameful history behind the "fruit machine" used to out gay Canadians

In Canada, a person cannot be fired from their job due to their sexual orientation. While the country does not explicitly grant or deny such a right to LGBTQ+ people under the Canadian Constitution, the Supreme Court has ruled that Section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms does protect against discrimination, including sexual orientation.

This was not always the case.

If you were a gay man in the 1950s and 1960s, and you worked for the federal government in any capacity, you could find yourself in a chair, looking at a screen, while your pupil responses to pornographic images were measured.

It was called The Fruit Machine by those who administered it, coined by an RCMP sergeant, and this will be the only time I will use that terrible term in this piece.

The machine was the brainchild of Dr. Frank Robert Wake, a psychology professor at Carleton University. He developed the machine at the university in the 1950s at the request of the federal government. The goal? To find out if a man in the civil service was homosexual.

Why would that matter?

Today, we would rightly question it.

Six decades ago, the world was a very different place though. For one, homosexuality was still illegal and would remain so, until a sweeping change to the Criminal Code in 1968.

At the time, it was believed among many psychologists that homosexuals suffered from character weaknesses. The government worried that those “weaknesses” could make them disloyal and easier to manipulate. As a result, the government saw gay men in the military, RCMP, and civil service as a security risk. In the era of the Cold War, the government believed these men could become Soviet spies.

“Homosexuals often appear to believe that the accepted ethical code which governs normal human relationships does not apply to them,” one dubious 1959 study stated.

To deal with this imaginary security risk, the government compiled a list of those it suspected to be homosexual, but the process took too long. To make things easier for themselves, they turned to Wake to develop his machine.

The homosexuality detection test

Wake was sent to the United States to study detection devices used in that country. Wake was intrigued by the work of Allan Seltzer at the University of Chicago. He claimed he could distinguish gay men from straight men by their responses to a series of pictures in a box.

After a year of research, he came back to Canada to work on this new machine.

Now, calling it a machine is a bit of a misnomer. It wasn’t quite a machine like a lie detector, but a series of tests.

Under the illusion of going in for a stress test, the subject was put in a chair like that of a dentist’s chair where he had his heart rate analyzed. He was also shown images of naked and semi-naked men and women. The person administering the test then viewed the subject’s pupil size and measured it to see if there was a reaction to the images.

In another test, the subject held a bag of anhydrous cobalt chloride and anhydrous silica gel. This came from a 1953 study by R.A. McCleary that measured small changes in the sweat of hands by using crystals that changed colour when exposed to moisture. The subject would be read “homosexual words” to determine if they sweated and caused the crystals to change.

The words included circus, bagpipe, blind, camp, fish, sew, house, and restaurant.

The machine was used on those already in the employment of the government and those looking to be employed.

The accuracy of these tests was highly questionable. While the pupillary response test is used in psychology, its use to determine homosexuality is based on the flawed assumption that an involuntary reaction could be measured scientifically, or that homosexuals and heterosexuals would respond differently. The dilation of the pupils was also extremely difficult to get a proper measurement of since the change was typically less than one millimetre.

Despite the dubious nature of the science behind the project, the machine was used until 1967 when funding was pulled by the Defence Research Board.

During the time that it was used, many civil service employees, RCMP officers, and soldiers lost their jobs or were demoted without cause. The RCMP also collected files on over 9,000 people who had been investigated.

“I think it was worth doing because it might have brought us a lot of knowledge of homosexuals,” Wake said in 1992, just prior to his death, adding that he was much more tolerant of homosexuality than others around him. “The others have caught up to me.”

Today, there is a call for Carleton to apologize for the machine. In 2017, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized in the House of Commons for the “gay purge” that was conducted by the federal government, including the use of Wake’s machine.