06/10/2021
On Monday lunchtime’s “fascinating facts” column on the album rock station Radio Caroline, PaCt Edison revisited the 1950s, when in one of the most bizarre aspects of the “gay purges” of some western governments, the Canadian state Cinvented a bizarre “gay detector” device, nick named the “fruit machine” after a derogatory Canadian and American term for gay men. The hairbrained contraption aimed to detect gay men employed by the federal government, by sapparently measuring the aperture of their pupils when looking at an attractive man in a photograph. Several thousand gay men are believed to have lost their jobs with the federal state during the time of the purges and the “machine”, which was finally decommissioned in around 1968. The current Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau has since issued a formal apology to all the men affected during this curious case of homophobic madness. Choosing the theme of strange machinery as his theme, Caroline DJ Pat Edison followed the feature on the machine with Jethro Tull’s album track “Part of the Machine”.
