How homosexuals were identified in Canada

In the 1960s, the Canadian government decided to identify all homosexual civil servants. To detect them, in 1962 officials introduced the so-called Fruit Machine — a device that showed test subjects erotic images while measuring their physical reactions. The harsh persecution of gay people in Canada did not fully come to an end until the late 1980s.

In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, the Western world was gripped by campaigns against communists and homosexuals, with the latter often automatically labelled “Red agents.” One of the triggers for this suspicion was the famous Cambridge Five — high-ranking Britons who had worked for the Soviet Union. Two of them were also homosexual. During the McCarthy era, classified sociological data were also cited, claiming that in the United States in the early 1950s, 20 percent of active communists and anti-militarists belonged to sexual minorities.

Canada, relatively calm and liberal for that period, did not escape the persecution of homosexuals either. In the 1950s, the secret police tracked members of sexual minorities in order to place them on “blacklists,” which barred them from government service, the military, intelligence agencies, and even the upper ranks of the humanities intelligentsia.

But the government was not satisfied with simply searching for sexual minorities in this way. In 1960, a decision was made to purge all homosexuals from the civil service.

In 1961, Frank Robert Wake, a professor of psychology at Carleton University, developed a test intended to quickly identify homosexuals. A team under his direction then created the Fruit Machine — a device resembling a polygraph. Test subjects were given word-association prompts and shown a series of images, including semi-nude men and women. Wires with sensors from the machine were attached to different parts of the body; they were meant to register sweating, heartbeat, pulse, and other physiological reactions. At the same time, the device also recorded the pupils’ responses to each image.

The Fruit Machine went into operation in 1962. Naturally, the test subjects were not told that they were being screened for homosexuality. Instead, the testing was presented as a way to measure stress resistance.

The machine remained in use until 1967. During that time, 80 percent of civil servants and military personnel were tested. Among them, 9,000 homosexuals were identified. They were divided into three categories: confirmed homosexuals, those resembling homosexuals — today they would likely be called bisexual — and latent gays. The first group, numbering around 1,500 people, was dismissed from government service under one pretext or another. The others were demoted, denied access to classified documents, and, whenever possible, pushed out of government institutions into insignificant positions in the public sector — for example, as public-transport conductors or forest inspectors.

In 1967, the media learned about the Fruit Machine, and the government was forced to shut the program down. At the same time, Canadian society — effectively among the first in the Western world — began a civil campaign to decriminalize homosexuality. It succeeded in 1967–1969, when same-sex relations ceased to be a criminal offence. Before that, a person could receive up to two years in prison.

However, Canada still had a long road ahead before homosexuality was fully decriminalized not only in criminal law but also in social and institutional practice. The government claimed that it had destroyed the results of the Fruit Machine tests, yet from time to time this information resurfaced when it emerged that a particular person had been dismissed or denied a government position under one pretext or another.

Homosexuality also continued to be regarded as a form of deviant behaviour and a mental abnormality. One of the most notorious cases in Canada was the Klippert case. Everett George Klippert, a ship mechanic living in the Northwest Territories, had been sentenced to three years in prison for gross indecency. But when the court learned that Klippert was homosexual, he was given an indeterminate prison sentence — in other words, until he was considered fully “cured.” In the end, he spent six years in prison, until a psychiatrist declared that he was potentially ready for heterosexual life.

Another highly publicized incident took place in Toronto on February 5, 1981, when police raided four gay bathhouses. A total of 268 homosexual men were arrested, and 19 of them were sentenced to various prison terms for indecent behaviour and for allegedly inducing men into homosexuality.

This Toronto incident finally turned Canadian public opinion in favour of the full decriminalization of homosexuality. The country’s political elite was forced not only to recognize gay people as equal to everyone else, but also, by the late 1980s, to allow homosexual marriages. Only eight years passed between the near-total rejection of homosexuals and their full legalization.

Around the same time, the legalization of homosexuality took place in most Western countries. Even in the United States, which until recently had been a bastion of the “fight against sodomy,” 1990 brought the repeal of a discriminatory law that had barred gay immigrants from entering the country — a measure adopted at the height of McCarthyism and the campaign against the communist threat. In 1990, criminal punishment for homosexuality was also abolished in another conservative country: England.

Nevertheless, analogues of the Fruit Machine continue to exist even in some developed countries. People from less developed nations who explain their flight from their homeland by citing persecution for homosexuality are required to undergo testing on such a machine. Just as in Canada fifty years earlier, they are shown erotic images and scenes of same-sex intimacy in an attempt to determine whether these images arouse them. Several Iranians failed such a homosexuality test in the Czech Republic and were deported.