Ottawa's Carleton University is once again being asked to confront one of the darkest chapters in its history — the so-called "fruit machine" experiments that sought to identify and purge gay men from Canada's civil service and military during the Cold War.
Two LGBT+ scholars are now conducting a deep investigation into the life and career of the disgraced Carleton professor who designed the device, examining how the university enabled, tolerated, and later quietly distanced itself from research that caused real harm to real people.
What Was the 'Fruit Machine'?
Developed in the 1960s, the "fruit machine" was a psychological apparatus designed to detect homosexuality in federal employees. Subjects — many of them unsuspecting — were shown homoerotic images while a machine measured involuntary physiological responses like pupil dilation and perspiration. The goal was simple and chilling: give the RCMP and federal government a scientific tool to root out gay and lesbian civil servants, who were classified as security risks.
The research was conducted at Carleton with the support of federal funding, and the professor at its centre spent years on campus developing and refining the device.
A Vague Apology, a Decade Ago
In 2016 — around the same time the federal government issued a formal apology for its systematic persecution of LGBT+ public servants — Carleton acknowledged the fruit machine research. But LGBT+ advocates and historians noted the apology was limited in scope, stopping short of naming the professor directly or fully examining what institutional responsibility the university bore.
For many survivors of the era's purges, and for queer scholars who have studied the period, that apology felt incomplete.
Scholars Push for a Fuller Reckoning
The two researchers now investigating the case are combing through university archives, personnel records, and historical documents to piece together how the professor's work was received on campus, what colleagues and administrators knew, and whether the institution took any steps to challenge or curtail the research at the time.
The investigation is part of a broader movement in Canadian academia to confront Cold War-era complicity in state-sponsored discrimination against LGBT+ people — a chapter that the federal government's 2017 apology brought into sharp public focus but did not fully resolve at the institutional level.
For Carleton, situated in the heart of the national capital where many of the targeted civil servants lived and worked, the stakes of this history are particularly local and personal.
Why It Still Matters
The fruit machine wasn't just a strange historical footnote — it was an instrument of a systematic purge that derailed careers, destroyed lives, and forced generations of Canadians to hide who they were. Many of those affected were Ottawa residents working in federal buildings just kilometres from the Carleton campus where the research was being conducted.
Scholars argue that universities have a responsibility not just to apologize but to document, name, and fully reckon with their role in such episodes — and that doing so is essential to ensuring LGBT+ students and faculty feel genuinely safe and valued on campus today.
Carleton has not yet responded publicly to the new investigation. Whether the university will engage openly with the researchers' findings remains to be seen.
Source: Ottawa Citizen. Read the original report at ottawacitizen.com.
