American Experience

MARTHA SHELLEY

In those days, what they would do, these psychiatrists, is they would try to talk you into being heterosexual. If that didn't work, they would do things like aversive conditioning-- you know, show you pornography and then give you an electric shock.

MAN (archival)

This involves showing the gay man pictures of nude males and shocking him with a strong electric current. Over a short period of time, he will be unable to get sexually aroused to the pictures, and hopefully, he will be unable to get sexually aroused outside in other settings as well.

WILLIAM ESKRIDGE

Gay people who were sentenced to medical institutions because they were found to be sexual psychopaths were subjected sometimes to sterilization, occasionally to castration, sometimes to medical procedures, such as lobotomies, which were felt by some doctors to cure homosexuality and other sexual diseases. The most infamous of those institutions was Atascadero in California. Atascadero was known in gay circles as the Dachau for queers, and appropriately so. The medical experimentation in Atascadero included administering to gay people a drug that simulated the experience of drowning. In other words, a pharmacological example of waterboarding.

DORIC WILSON

Somebody that I knew that was older than me, his family had him sent off where they go up and damage the frontal part of the brain. The last time I saw him, he was a walking vegetable. Because he was homosexual.