Film Screening – The Fruit Machine

As cold war anxieties surged in the middle of the twentieth century, Western governments became fixated on fears of Communist infiltration. In the US and Canada, these fears sparked a panic that people with so-called “character weaknesses,” and especially gays and lesbians, were susceptible to foreign blackmail, and thus constituted a national security threat.

In The Fruit Machine, filmmaker Sarah Fodey examines the extraordinary toll that this panic took on the lives of LGBTQ+ people working in the Canadian military and civil service in the postwar period. Beginning in the 1950s and lasting until 1992, the Canadian government undertook a sweeping purge of suspected homosexuals from its ranks. Working with researchers at Ottawa’s Carleton University, the government even attempted to develop a machine—known as the fruit machine—for detecting homosexual tendencies in its employees. Harrowing and intimate, The Fruit Machine is a timely examination of what happens when homophobic panic, backed by the power of the state, meets the dubious promise of a new technology.

In this event, filmmaker Sarah Fodey will join moderator Tyler Morgenstern for a post-screening discussion of The Fruit Machine.