Dealing with homosexuals in the public service was a familiar problem for Western governments during the 1950s and early 1960s.
A criminal offense in most countries, homosexuals were often punished with imprisonment and/or mandatory psychiatric treatment, that made closeted homosexuals especially vulnerable to blackmail or recruitment by hostile governments. At least, that was the argument used to justify the security campaigns rooting out any homosexuals (real or suspected) in sensitive positions. Although the anti-homosexual crusades in the United States and Great Britain are well-documented, that the Canadian government did the same was largely shrouded in secrecy for decades. It was only during the 1990s that the Canadian Press used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain many previously classified documents outlining how thoroughly Canadian security forces managed to destroy the lives of countless gay men and lesbians working in sensitive positions. They also demonstrated some of the bizarre methods by which gay men and lesbians were identified.
The Problem of Homosexuality
Beginning in 1959 with a Special Panel on "Security Cases involving Character Weaknesses with Special Reference to the Problem of Homosexuality", the question of what to do with homosexuals and lesbians in the public service became a critical issue for Canada's security forces. According to one declassified memo:
Sexual abnormalities appear to be the favourite target of hostile intelligence agencies, and of these homosexuality is most often used. The nature of homosexuality appears to adapt itself to this kind of exploitation. By exercising fairly simple precautions, homosexuals are usually able to keep their habits hidden from those who are not specifically seeking them out. Further, homosexuals often appear to believe that the accepted ethical code which governs normal human relationships does not apply to them. Their propensity is often accompanied by other specific weaknesses such as excessive drinking with its resultant instabilities, a defiant attitude towards the rest of society, and a concurrent urge to seek out the company of persons with similar characteristics, often in disreputable bars, night clubs, or restaurants....From the small amount of information we have been able to find out about homosexual behaviour generally, certain characteristics appear to stand out - instability, willing self-deceit, defiance towards society, a tendency to surround oneself with persons of similar propensities, regardless of other considerations - none of which inspire the confidence one would hope to have in persons required to fill positions of trust and responsibility.
Weeding out the Homosexuals
Although the anti-homosexual purge was inspired by the Cold War hysteria prevalent in most Western countries during the 1950s (spurred on by Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade in the United States), the Canadian security agencies took a special zeal in weeding out homosexual men and women wherever they could be found. Not only were homosexuals arrested and prosecuted throughout Canada but Canadian immigration laws were passed in 1952 banning known homosexuals from entering the country. While never as public as the anti-homosexual purges in other countries (and lacking high-profile victims such as Alan Turing in the United Kingdom), the continuing spy trials and sex scandals from other countries helped fuel the perception that homosexuals were inherently dangerous, both to themselves and to their country. Lesbians were not initially pursued with the same ruthless intensity although criminal laws were revised in 1953 to make female homosexuality a crime in Canada.
After 1953, both men and women faced the risk of being labelled a "Criminal Sexual Psychopath" whenever evidence of homosexual activity (consensual or not) found its way into the courts. For Canada's military, proven homosexual conduct was grounds for dishonourable discharge for both men and women. While the focus was on male recruits, lesbianism was also seen as a threat to military discipline due to the "unfeminine" activities of lesbians in the service. For cases of suspected homosexuals, military procedure called for a formal investigation (later enshrined under the 1967 Canadian Forces Administrative Order (CFAO) 19-20, Sexual Deviation - Investigation, Medical Investigation and Disposal for the "proper" handling and dismissal of serving men and women found guilty of homosexual conduct). Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Canadian and American security agencies freely shared information on all perceived high-risk individuals (including possible homosexual activity of people in "sensitive" positions).
With consultation of security agencies on both sides of the border, a more formal procedure went into place in 1963 with the drafting of a new Cabinet Directive on "Security in the Public Services of Canada". While not referring to homosexuals specifically, the new directive referenced "illicit sexual behaviour" and called for an "attitude of much greater frankness whose reliability or loyalty is in doubt". Any prospective employee who openly admitted to homosexual conduct would either not be hired or else transferred to a less "sensitive" position (usually with less importance). For employees who were not forthcoming about their sexuality, the security agencies made little actual distinction between hidden homosexuals who were actually disloyal or who simply had the potential of being disloyal. Since the RCMP was in charge of all security investigations, their agents had the primary responsibility of investigating suspected homosexuals in virtually every branch of the Canadian government (except for the military which had its own intelligence division). There was no independent review of the RCMP’s operation and accused homosexuals had no chance of defending themselves against accusations.
Over time, the RCMP investigations eventually affected thousands of men and women, whether they were civil servants or not. The total number of RCMP reports of suspected homosexuals rose from 1000 in 1960-1961 to 7500 in 1965-66. Since few statistics were kept, the actual number of men and women whose lives were destroyed by relentless RCMP investigations and accusations of homosexuality can only be estimated. For every high-profile case such as David Johnson, former Canadian ambassador to Moscow and his predecessor, John Watkins (who died of a heart attack following an RCMP interrogation), countless others were either fired, transferred or blacklisted based on suspected sexual improprieties.
Despite only one-third of the RCMP investigations actually involving people in the civil service, right-wingers in the Canadian government denounced Canada’s external affairs department and embassies around the world as “a notorious cess-pool of homosexuals and perverts”. The RCMP investigators in charge of locating homosexuals demanded and eventually got an expanded mandate and the list of suspects grew to include thousands of names. Although the Canadian government placed some controls on the RCMP to prevent them from publicly exposing homosexuals unless they were considered to be security risks, the RCMP often acted as judge and jury (since homosexuality was still a criminal offense at the time).
Whatever the reality, the perception that thousands of hidden homosexuals were undermining Canadian security meant that a better way of identifying them was needed. Fortunately, Canadian security agencies had their own expert on hand for that. Dr. F. Robert Wake of Carleton University was already a well-known figure in forensic circles with his work on juvenile delinquency and deviancy. As the first chair of Carleton's Psychology Department as well as a researcher for the Royal Commission on the Criminal Law Relating to Criminal Sexual Psychopaths during the 1950s, he was well known to security agencies and seemed best suited for developing a better way of finding hidden homosexuals.
And he was definitely up for the challenge...
Bringing in the Scientists
Since prevailing psychological and psychiatric thinking at the time maintained that homosexuals were either mentally ill or psychologically abnormal, depending on mental health professionals to identify closeted homosexuals in the public service made good sense. With funding from National Health and Welfare, Dr. Wake traveled to the United States to research methods used there to find a more "scientific" means of identifying homosexuals. Since RCMP investigations of suspected homosexuals were long and expensive, a more direct procedure was needed. In a 1962 "Report on Special Project", Dr. Wake restated his own opinion that homosexuals were intrinsically unsuited for employment in the public service due to their mental instability and general unreliability.
Although he was already aware of Evelyn Hooker and her research disputing prevailing opinions that homosexuals were maladjusted, Dr. Wake was very much a traditionalist. In explaining what caused the difference types of homosexuality that he discussed in his report, Dr. Wake argued that homosexual tendencies were produced by “a combination of environmental circumstances during the years of childhood or early youth”. Since there was no way of curing homosexuals based on prevailing medical science, he argued that their sexual desires needed to be controlled through medication and aversion therapy.
While he focused on male homosexuality in his report, he also included information on lesbians as well and largely drew on the Kinsey results as an estimate on the actual number of homosexuals likely to exist in the Public Service. The most far-reaching part of his report was included under the heading of "Methods for Identifying Homosexuals". Arguing that there was more than one homosexual type, he ruled out the possible of a single test for identifying homosexuals. Carefully outlining the various methods used in the United States, including psychiatric interviews, medical examinations, and projective tests, he then discussed the different physiological tests or measuring sexual arousal.
After ruling out the polygraph as having too many problems to be useful, Dr. Wake also considered the finger plethysmograph (measuring blood volume in the finger using a pneumatic tube), palmar sweat index measures (perspiration), and pupillary response tests. In his comprehensive report, F.R. Wake proposed the development of a formal test of homosexuality (or, as he termed it, “suitability for employment”) using physiological measures of arousal. And, thus, the “fruit machine project” was launched.
The Rise and Fall of the “Fruit Machine”
According to John Sawatsky, author of Men in the Shadows, the term “fruit machine” was coined by RCMP agents who were leery of being recruited to act as the “normative sample” in testing the proposed device. Although the “fruit machine” was never actually developed, the project spearheaded by Wake was financed by the National Defense and Health and Welfare departments for four years. Along with Dr. Wake, the project would eventually bring in a large team of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other researchers, all dedicated to creating a machine for diagnosing homosexuality better than any of the existing methods.
Although descriptions of the methodology proposed by Wake is fairly limited in the surviving documents related to his project, the machine was apparently meant to measure changes in pupil dilation in conjunction with a word association test using a list of words with a hidden homosexual meaning. The proposed word list would include words such as: queen, circus, gay, bagpipe, bell, whole, blind, bull, camp, coo, cruise, drag, dike (dyke), fish, flute, fruit, mother, punk, queer, tea room, etc. Since many of the words had a double meaning that men and women immersed in the homosexual subculture would presumably know, measuring their physiological responses would presumably expose their hidden sexual identity.
The pupillary measure that Dr. Wake recommended in his report had been developed at the University of Chicago by two researchers, Eckhard Hess and James Polt. A graduate student, Alan Seltzer had used the Hess-Polt procedure with slides comparing nearly-nude pictures of men taken from bodybuilding magazines with “neutral” slides (paintings) and claimed to be able to tell homosexual from heterosexual subjects based on pupil dilation data alone. As Dr. Wake argued in his report, pupillary response measures were ideal in catching homosexuals since pupil dilation was completely involuntary and “cannot be controlled by the subject”. He was especially impressed by the report of one homosexual subject who had admitted to trying to fool the machine only to find that he could not.
In developing his own homosexuality-detection device, Dr. Wake proposed a new experiment combining the Hess-Polt apparatus “with a suitable visual stimuli; a measure of skin perspiration… with a modification to measure pulse rate. Subjects: fifteen normal males, fifteen normal females, fifteen homosexual males, fifteen homosexual females. As the experiment progresses, additional normal and homosexual subjects in unspecified numbers. All subjects to be supplied by the RCMP". The experimental procedure in Wake's proposal was straightforward enough: "the experimental stimuli will be pictures designed to elicit the subjects' interest in males and females...The first sixty subjects will be processed to determine the reaction patterns of normals and homosexuals. Then using these patterns as criteria, the experimenter will attempt to distinguish homosexuals presented by the RCMP, where nothing of the subject is known to the research team. Those methods proving successful will be retained for continuing research." Ultimately, the focus of Wake's research was to identify homosexual men and women by detecting "involuntary" sexual responses to the experimental stimuli (whether using pictures, presented words or audiotapes).
Ambitious as Wake's project was, it eventually bogged down over various technical snags. That included the difficulty in finding a large enough sample of actual homosexuals and “normal” men and women to establish the actual effectiveness of the machine. For obvious reasons, recruiting known homosexual men was hard enough (and the RCMP had no contacts at all in the female homosexual community as one rueful RCMP memo pointed out). Even getting heterosexual men and women to participate was also a stumbling block (the reputation of the "fruit machine" project was enough to scare off any would-be volunteers in the RCMP community, none of whom wanted to be branded as "fruits" by their responses to the stimuli). Since there were no female RCMP agents at the time, recruiting heterosexual women was deemed "inappropriate" (it was the early 1960s, after all). Even attempting to recruit test subjects from other government departments failed to provide the needed numbers that Wake called for in his proposal. There was also the operational problem of adapting the technology to adjust for height, eyeball size, and distance between eyeballs (all of which potentially distorted the machine's results).
Despite some progress, Wake's research project remained stalled for years before being eventually scrapped in 1967. For all the money spent and the years of effort, the great fruit machine project was a bust.
After the Fruit Machine
Even as early as 1967, changes in Canadian society made the RCMP's crusade against homosexuals harder than ever. Despite a formal partnership with the morality divisions of city police forces (which allowed them to threaten suspects with arrest for failing to name fellow homosexuals), the improving legal situation for gay men and lesbians made the paranoia surrounding homosexuals in the public service harder to justify. Along with the passage of the 1967 Sexual Offenses Act in the U.K. (which effectively decriminalized homsexuality) and the fight to decriminalize homosexuality in Canada. Then Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau defended decriminalization with his famous line that "there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation". Canada's Criminal Law Amendment Act was finally passed in 1969 despite a massive anti-gay campaign by conservative and religious groups and allegations that the new law was motivated by "communism, socialism, and atheism".
While the situation was slowly improving for sexual minorities in Canada, attitudes in the public service were slow to change and many gay men and lesbians were still fired for being "not advantageously employable". Even as recently as 1992, Michelle Douglas' firing for being a lesbian led to the groundbreaking legal decision removing the ban on homosexuals openly serving in the Canadian military . Virtually all government documents outlining the anti-gay security campaign, as well as the fruit machine project vanished into government archives until the Associated Press forced their release in the 1990s. Despite Canada's reputation as being a liberal country, it's still hard to estimate how many thousands of lives were ruined by the RCMP's security campaign. As Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile pointed out in their gripping book, The Canadian War on Queers, it was the national security campaign that likely spurred the growth of the gay liberation movement in Canada.
While F. Robert Wake died in 1993 (with obituaries carefully avoiding any mention of his security work), that was hardly the end of the quest to build a successful "fruit machine". Ironically, a far better approach to measuring sexual arousal became widely available in Canada when Dr. Kurt Freund arrived in 1968 to begin a new position at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry (now the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health). Through the penile plethysmograph technique he pioneered in Europe, Dr. Freund created the first practical method for detecting sexual interest in males by measuring blood flow to the penis.
Although he had initially been commissioned to develop the test by the Czech military to weed out homosexuals in the military, Dr. Freund's early research in aversive conditioning led him to conclude that homosexuals could not be "cured" in this fashion and called for the decriminalization of homosexuality in Czechoslovakia. After coming to Canada as a refugee in 1968, he successfully resisted any attempt to use his penile plethysmography technique to identify homosexuals in Canada and pushed for decriminalization instead. While this won him few friends in the largely Freudian psychiatric community of that time, his laboratory became one of the first in the world to use penile plethysmography (now more commonly known as phallometry) to detect sexual arousal in men accused of pedophilia and related sexual offenses.
Although Dr. Freund opposed attempts to use his phallometry technique to detect homosexual men during his lifetime, reports have surfaced of phallometric testing of homosexuals have surfaced in other countries (including Dr. Freund's birthplace, the Czech Republic). As recently as 2011, the European Union Commission issued a statement declaring the Czech Republic's ongoing use of sexual arousal tests on gay asylum seekers to be in direct violation of EU asylum laws. In citing several recent cases of gay refugees being forced to undergo phallometry as part of their application for asylum in the Czech Republic, the EU's Fndamental Rights Agency has flagged the Czech Republic for being the only country in Europe to demand such testing for refugees.
Despite the Czech Republic coming under the spotlight due to being part of the European Union, the use of phallometry and other tests of sexual arousal in non-European countries is not so well documented. Given that homosexuality is still a criminal offense in numerous countries around the world, using widely available sexual arousal testing to identify and prosecute homosexual men and women may well be far more prevalent than anyone realizes.
Perhaps the "fruit machine" saga isn't quite over yet.
Comments