The Crack Down: the 1960s

In a memorandum to the Prime Minister in 1963, the Clerk of the Privy Council wrote that of the 800 investigated homosexuals in the public service, only one attempt had been made to blackmail an employee on the basis of sexual orientation. In that case, the attempt at blackmail was unsuccessful as the employee reported the attempt to their supervisor and subsequently resigned from their position. The report did find, however, successful attempts at blackmailing married men engaging in infidelity. Despite this finding, in the same memorandum, the Clerk provides a few modifications to be made to the security screening policy, none suggesting that the hunt for homosexuals should be redirected.

The Fruit Machine

Fruit Machine research attempted to find a scientific method for detecting homosexuality, to be used in security screening procedures. Ideally, the RCMP would be able to pre-emptively detect if a person was queer before hiring them into the public service. Dr Frank Wake, a Carleton psychology professor was the catalyst for this approach. [1]

Dr Frank Wake's tests included tests which measure blood volume, perspiration, eye movements, pupil dilation, attention span, word associations, and gender role assumptions.[2]

Wake relied on and utilized American psychological and psychiatric research in his own fruit machine research, which was financially backed by numerous federal departments.[3]

The Fruit Machine project was approved as a government project in 1963, and the project was discontinued in 1967 after it became clear that there was no scientific way to detect queerness. 

The government did not keep its investigations focused on public servants, and by the end of the decade, the RCMP had amassed a list of over 9000 names of suspected or confirmed homosexuals, two-thirds of whom were neither military nor civic service.[4]

In fact, surveillance techniques and strategies became known throughout the queer community, and queer people developed ways to signal to one another when an agent was spotted.[5] 

Despite the lack of attention to Canada's LGBT purge at the time, especially in the shadow of the United States' Lavender Scare, queer communities in Ottawa spread awareness and advice through a type of whisper networks.[6]