A look back in time - Carleton called on to apologize for gay ‘testing'

In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, the Canadian government hired Carleton University professor Frank Robert Wake to devise a scientific test to determine whether a person was gay.

Can you imagine if news like this came out today? Heads would surely roll!

I cannot believe this was ever totally given up on, just hidden...

The prevailing view at the time was that homosexuals suffered from a character weakness that could make them disloyal and easy to manipulate. In the United States, which was in the grips of McCarthyism, homosexuals were often seen as communist sympathizers.

Now who do you think falls into that category today?

But all that surveillance was costly and time-consuming, so the government needed Wake, who was the chair of Carleton’s psychology department, to come up with an easier method for determining a person’s sexual orientation.

What he devised came to be known as the “fruit machine.” There wasn’t an actual machine though, just a collection of psychological tests, including one designed to detect how a subject’s pupil responds to images of naked or semi-naked men and women.

I really feel bad for any people who our great leaders deem as undesirable, yesterday or today.

ottawasun.com...

a reply to: TWS1969

Can't really say this is surprising since homosexuality was considered a mental illness.

a reply to: Bluntone22

Well, it was just 10 years ago or so that Alan Turing (inventor of the turing machine) was jailed and subjected to forced hormonal treatments for being gay.

So this isn't suprising that in 1961 homosexuals were still being subject to cruel and unusual treatments.

a reply to: TWS1969
I’ve got a fool prove test .If he likes sucking cock he’s gay .

a reply to: CptGreenTea

Well, it was just 10 years ago or so that Alan Turing (inventor of the turing machine) was jailed and subjected to forced hormonal treatments for being gay.

Alan Turing was prosecuted for homosexual acts and forced to accept some sort of chemical castration rather than be jailed in 1952, 70 years ago.
He died in 1954.

a reply to: CptGreenTea

Say when now???

Thanks Freeborn

Edit
There is a road named after him in my neck of the woods

a reply to: TWS1969

So what's new about gay spies?
The secret worlds of spying and homosexuality have always gone well together, says Phillip Knightley

Phillip Knightley
IN THE good old days when Britain's secret services recruited only at Oxbridge - instead of through newspaper advertisements - one student, later to become a famous Sunday newspaper correspondent, was discreetly approached to join MI6. He went through all the preliminary vetting and then went for a one-to-one interview that could clinch the job.

As he later described it: "The interviewer was a master spy, later to become head of the service. He had a brilliant mind as sharp as a steel trap and it was a pleasure to talk with him. He painted a glowing picture of what life would be like with what he called 'the old firm' and I was seriously considering committing myself when I felt his hand on my knee under the table. I thought it might be some sort of test, but when it began to creep up my thigh I decided that was the end of that."

So the news last week that the secret services have relaxed their ban on gays to attract recruits from a broader section of the population - "MI5 brings homosexuals back in from the cold", as one headline put it - is a little puzzling.

www.independent.co.uk...

I can remember reading a book, not sure if it was 'spy catcher' that revealed that many of the double agents at MI5 & MI6 in the 1950s were also homosexual.