[a4isms]

The fictitious Voight-Kampff test is based on a real machine based on terrible pseudo-science that was used in the 1960s to allegedly detect homosexuals working in Canadian public service so they could be purged. The line from the movie where Rachel asks if Deckard is trying to determine whether she is a replicant or a lesbian may be an allusion to the fruit machine. One of its features was measuring eye dilation, just as depicted in the movie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_machine_(homosexuality_t...

The stakes for men subjected to the test were the loss of their livelihoods, public shaming, and ostracism. So... Blade Runner was not just predicting the future, it was describing the world Philip K. Dick lived in when he wrote "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" in the late 1960s.

[JTbane]

This was an uncomfortable read, I'm quite frankly shocked at the amount of brainpower and other resources that went into attempting to weed out gay men from the Canadian civil service, into the 90s no less! To what end was this done? Is a gay man a worse cop or bureaucrat?

Then I remembered what happened to Turing in the 50s.

[danans]

> To what end was this done? Is a gay man a worse cop or bureaucrat?

We seem to need an internal enemy to blame for our societies' problems, because it's easier than facing the reality that we all play a part in creating those problems.

Gay people are among the oldest of those targets, going back to at least the times of the Old Testament (i.e. Sodom and Gomorrah).

We've only recently somewhat evolved past that mindset.

[calfuris]

If a malicious actor found a gay person in such a job, they could easily extort them with the threat of getting them fired! So obviously you had to fire gay people, lest they get extorted by someone threatening to expose them and thus get them fired.