Whilst the end of the 19th century saw the advent of the concept of homosexuality as a pathological medical or psychological condition this also legitimised ‘treatments’ to try to change it in individuals and in fact such treatments were practised from them and peaked as late as early 1970s.7 Why did people accept the need for such treatments? Well, in a groundbreaking survey in the 1990s,* which questioned those who grew up between 1940 and 1970 and underwent such treatment, they often commented on the extremely negative influence of the British media on them, one said:
‘There were no positive role models and the newspapers were full of the most vituperative filth that made me feel suicidal. I felt totally bewildered that my entire emotional life was being written up in the papers as utter filth and perversity’.
Treatment was often prescribed by doctors when patients visited them, as they felt they could not share such feelings with anyone else, telling of the negativity that it was having on their lives. The age at which most people received treatment was in their late adolescence and early twenties. These treatments were mainly administered in NHS hospitals throughout Britain and those treated privately usually underwent psychoanalysis. The most common treatment (from the early 1960s to early 1970s, was behavioural aversion therapy with electric shocks (eleven participants) and nausea induced by apomorphine these patients often having to be admitted to hospital due to side effects of nausea and dehydration and the need for repeated doses, while those receiving electric shock aversion therapy attended as outpatients for weeks or in some cases up to two years.
Other treatments that we know were used then included the use of oestrogen to reduce libido, religious counselling, electroconvulsive therapy, discussion of the evils of homosexuality, desensitisation of an assumed phobia of the opposite sex, hypnosis, psychodrama, and abreaction. None were very ‘successful’, even those administering the treatment really only going through the motions. For many patients, the contrast between the depth of their sexual feelings and the ‘simplicity’ of the supposed treatment made many doubt the wisdom of the approach and they became disillusioned and stopped the treatments themselves. Sometimes treatment ended abruptly, one person in the survey noting:
I said, “when am I going to find a breakthrough? You keep saying things will change and everything’s going to be OK.” She [the psychiatrist] said, “well, I’m going to have to tell you now I don’t think we are going to get anywhere. To be quite honest I never expected we would in the first place. You’re going to have to go home and tell your wife that you’re gay and start a new life.” Boom!
More famously now, in 1954 Alan Turing, the English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist, influential in the development of computer science, committed suicide by taking cyanide, having been given a course of female hormones (chemical castration) by doctors, as an alternative to being sent to prison, after being prosecuted by the police for gross indecency, because of his sexual relations with a 19 year old man Arnold Murray, in January 1952. However there does remain some dispute about whether his suicide by ingestion of cyanide was deliberate or accidental.
In 2009 following an internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for “the appalling way he was treated”. Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a posthumous pardon in 2013. The “Alan Turing law” is now an informal term for a 2017 law in the United Kingdom that retroactively pardoned men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts. He has recently been celebrated in the film The Imitation Game and by the inclusion from the 23rd June 2021 of his portrait on the fifty pound note in the UK. For many it is still too little, too late.
In 2018, it was also announced that controversial “gay conversion therapies” were to be banned as part of a government plan to improve the lives of gay and transgender people. At the time, the government did not offer a definition of “conversion therapy”, but its report said it “can range from pseudo-psychological treatments to, in extreme cases, surgical interventions and ‘corrective’ rape”. However, A national survey of 108,000 members of the LGBT community recently suggested that 2% have undergone the practice, with another 5% having been offered it. So clearly it is still something that is practised even today in countries like the UK, so it can be imagined what the situation must be in those countries with less progressive outlooks, of which there are still many.
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