(Transcript - link for video at the bottom of page. Original production by Powered by Rainbow. Presented by Professor Pride )
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The Origins of Gay Conversion Therapy
At a conference on hypnosis, in 1899, a German psychiatrist made a bold claim to his audience that he turned a gay man straight. In his professional opinion, all it took was a few 45 minute hypnosis sessions and a few trips to a brothel, where the gay man was told to have sex with a woman prostitute.
His sad attempt to gain fame, or professional promotion, was the spark which ignited what we now know as conversion therapy.
But back in those days, homosexuality was considered deviant, sinful, and even criminal for centuries.
And that's why in the late 19 century, doctors began to try to address it.
They labelled it as a medical term, and even classified it as a disease in the American Psychiatric Association, which allowed them to do insane things to experiment a “cure”.
For instance, Austrian doctors believed homosexuality was rooted in a man's testicles, so they were, somehow, allowed to experiment on this in the 1920s.
They would take a gay man, castrate them, and transplant the testicles of a straight man into the gay man's scrotum.
Others theorised that everyone was born innately bisexual, and homosexual people were just becoming gay because they chose that path.
And their experiments to set gay men back on the right path.
Some LGBTQ people were given electroconvulsive therapy, where their bodies were literally shocked with electricity as they watched gay pornography.
Other times the doctors put electrodes directly on the subjects’ brain, or worse yet, they performed lobotomies on gay men. A lobotomy is the practice of literally removing a section of someone's brain, because researchers believed homosexuality was only present in one area of someone's brain. Their theory was that, if they simply removed that section of their brain, it would turn their subject straight again.
However, in their studies they didn't have one section of the brain where they knew it was located.
So they experimented, by removing different sections from different people's brains until they found it.
But of course, being gay is in your DNA throughout your whole body. So they never found this miracle section of the brain through thousands of experiments.
Some other doctors thought they could scare LGBTQ people back to being straight. So they gave gay men chemicals which made them vomit whenever they saw photos of their gay lovers.
And researchers even hooked up the gay subjects’ genitals to electrical devices, to shock them whenever they saw pictures of same sex genitals.
Starting On The Long Righting The Wrongs Road
By 1973, gay rights activists finally won in the APA reversing its idiotic notion that being gay was a mental illness. But this wasn't the end of conversion therapy.
While doctors were no longer allowed to perform such experiments on gay people under the medical field, religious and self-proclaimed experts in the faith-based groups took over the practice of conversion therapy.
While reports claim that all of these medical experiments are still happening in conversion therapy camps across the world, nowadays gay conversion therapy camps mostly focus on isolating the subject and trying to pray the gay away.
Many organisations psychologically, and even sexually, abused subjects. And this leads to massive numbers of victims having actual mental health needs after attending such camps.
Conversion therapy is still legally allowed and is still going on in many countries around the world, including the United States.
However, just this past year, Germany, the country which started it all, has now outlawed the practice altogether.
Click on CONTINUE to further read and listen about Dr Anonymous' speech to the American Psychiatric Association:
'I am a homosexual. I am a psychiatrist': How Dr. Anonymous changed history
At a 1972 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. John Fryer disguised himself and delivered a speech that changed the course of LGBTQ history.
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