In the 1960s, the Canadian government commissioned a series of homosexuality tests known as the fruit machine. It didn't work, and ruined countless lives

Before the end of this year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will apologize for the mistreatment of gay and lesbian men and women during the Cold War, during which Canada waged a brutal crusade to remove homosexuals from public service, the RCMP and the military. Careers and lives were destroyed as the government accused thousands of the crime of “sexual abnormality,” often with little or no evidence.

A major part of that was the “fruit machine,” a series of homosexuality tests developed by the Canadian government’s Security Panel, which coordinated federal security campaigns and reported directly to cabinet. According to former Vancouver Sun journalist John Sawatsky’s book Men in the Shadows: The RCMP Security Service, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker never knew about the exact nature of the project, but accepted the panel’s advice that gays needed to be removed from public office by way of concrete proof of their sexuality.

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“It was quite devastating,” said Gary Kinsman, a Carleton sociology professor who co-wrote The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation. “Especially early on, hundreds of people lost their jobs in the first couple years in the early 1960s. People would be called into a security official’s office and they would be told, ‘We have evidence that you may be a homosexual. What do you have to say about this?'”

The fruit machine consisted of a series of questions, a chair resembling one you might sit in at a dentist’s office, and flashing images of mundane scenes contrasted with pornography that people in the ’50s thought gay people would like — think: half-naked carnival strongmen. Subjects (who were told the machine was measuring stress) sat in the chair and watched the images while scientists noted their pulse rate, skin reflexes, breathing rate and pupillary response.

Hundreds of people lost their jobs in the first couple years

The Canadian War Museum displays an electropsychometer — or e-meter — that the museum says was used to detect homosexuals during the Cold War. Online, the listing calls it the “fruit machine,” but in the museum itself the text simply mentions the investigations as a whole. Either way, Kinsman is adamant that an e-meter was never used as part of the fruit machine.

“We protested it, we challenged it, we said, ‘This is not the fruit machine’ — at least not the fruit machine that the Canadian government was trying to develop in the 1960s,” he said.

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An e-meter is a machine that measures the small amount of electricity that runs through human skin. While e-meters are used for certain clinical trials , they’re most widely known for their association with the church of Scientology, which uses them to test for thetans ( secret alien souls that control all our thoughts and emotions ) during the auditing process of its members. The church has been court-ordered to admit that “by itself, this meter does nothing. It is for religious use by students and Ministers of the church in Confessionals and pastoral counseling only.”

The whole setup “looked like something out of science fiction,” Sawatsky quotes an unnamed participant as saying. “It didn’t look as if it had been built on earth. I’m not trying to be sensational about that. It was a whole bunch of girders that were small flanges to bolt equipment together, and a screen in a box containing naughty pictures.”

“The plan was to monitor as many physiological variables as possible in the hope of finding a reliable method for identifying homosexuals without arousing the fear and anxiety involved with polygraph testing,” Sawatsky wrote.

The plan was to monitor as many physiological variables as possible in the hope of finding a reliable method for identifying homosexuals without arousing the fear and anxiety involved with polygraph testing

Enter Frank Robert Wake, a Carleton psychology professor the government recruited and sent to the United States for a year to study the homosexual detection measures that were being developed there. They paid him about $5,000, or about $40,000 in today’s dollars.

There, he came across a study an American university professor had recently done for a marketing firm in which he strapped a camera to subjects’ heads and measured their pupil dilation as they roamed a grocery store to see which product packaging interested them the most. Wake decided that this would be the perfect basis for his project. A camera measured their subjects’ pupils as naughty images flashed — if their pupils dilated when they saw someone of the same sex, they were a homosexual and therefore a threat to national security.

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“We supposedly suffer from a character weakness that meant that we were vulnerable to blackmail from evil Soviet agents,” said Kinsman. “The people that we talked to (for the book), they say that the only people who ever tried to blackmail them were the RCMP themselves, who tried to force them to give over the names of lesbians and gay men that they knew.”

Immediately, the team ran into a problem: “The technology for performing such tests in a sexual context was unknown and had to be invented,” wrote Sawatsky, “thus most of the experimenting was done on the technology and not the objectives.”

While it’s true that pupil dilation indicates arousal or interest, the test failed to take into account the fact that pupils also react to light. Going from a brighter photo to a darker one caused the same reaction as sexual interest — a problem the scientists invested a lot of time trying to remedy, with no success.

The exact numbers remain unclear but, according to Kinsman, the Canadian government spent more than $10,000 (more than $80,000 today) on the fruit machine in one year of testing.

“It wasn’t just some bizarre, little experiment that a couple of people in the corner over there in the RCMP or in the military decided to do,” he said. “It never could work, it never did work, but the government poured thousands and thousands of dollars into it.”

The project was plagued by a litany of other problems, including the fact that any bisexual subjects would have completely negated the test. The test’s cameras also had to be mounted from the side so as not to block the subjects’ views of the images, which made their pupil size even harder to measure.

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Ultimately, the project collapsed when the homosexual panic died down a bit, and the government decided its coffers no longer ran deep enough to justify breaking new scientific pupil measurement barriers to oust gay people from their jobs. The fruit machine scientists requested more money and the Defence Research Board, which “had never been interested in the project in the first place” according to Sawatsky, readily cut the funding.

Kinsman sees the forthcoming apology as an important opportunity for the government to go into detail about past wrongs.

“This apology has to be pretty broad-ranging, and pretty comprehensive, including things like the Canadian government’s participation in things like the fruit machine,” said Kinsman. “This was a major violation of these people’s rights.”