Electric shock therapy? Chemical castration? These were just two of the horrendous “cures” for homosexuality prevalent since the 1940s in the US and UK. Perhaps the worst of them all — and the least talked about — is how Dr Walter Jackson Freeman II made it his mission to lobotomise hundreds of gay men
Words Hugh Kaye
A YOUNG JOHN CONNOR defies the warning of his cyborg defender and orders the indestructible machine to help break his mother, Sarah, out of the asylum she’s been detained in for her belief that machines are going to take over the world. No prizes for knowing that this is a scene from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the 1991 blockbuster that’s earned in the region of $521m (£420 million) worldwide. What you probably won’t know is that the asylum in the film is based on a real-life mental institution called Atascadero State Hospital, in San Luis Obispo County, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. In 1949, Californian judges were given the option to brand homosexuals charged with sodomy or “oral copulation” — both illegal at the time — either as criminals to be punished, or as mentally ill people to be “cured”. Instead of being sent to prison for between five and 10 years, gay men could be locked up in a state hospital until “cured”, which meant the sentence could potentially see them incarcerated for the rest of their lives.
Once known as the “Dachau for queers”, it has been claimed that, among other procedures, experiments carried out at the hospital included administering “medicine” to gay men that simulated the experience of drowning — amounting to a drug-induced version of what we now call waterboarding. Essentially, torture.
An all-male institution, Atascadero opened in 1954 to treat “mentally disordered” sex offenders. But under Californian law, doctors were allowed to commit those who “practised sodomy” to the hospital. It’s commonly known that some of these so-called cures undertaken at some hospitals included gay men being chemically castrated or given electric shock treatment to prevent them from being attracted to other men. Yet there was an even more barbaric procedure. Enter, Dr Walter Jackson Freeman II.
Known as the Father of the Lobotomy, Freeman became a Professor of Neurology at George Washington University in 1926. He performed his first lobotomy in 1936, and would operate on patients’ brains for about 30 years. In 1946, he tested the procedure that would become his preferred method for the
