Queer Cures

In the 1920s, German medical researchers implanted testicles from corpses into the bodies of homosexual men, in order to increase testosterone levels. Knight says, "They were told they were going to have an operation, but not what was going to be done to them."

Peter Price volunteered for it when he was 18, after his mother found out he was gay. Wheeler writes, "He remembers being put into a windowless room in a psychiatric ward, where he had to listen to an audio tape disparaging his homosexuality 'in the foulest language imaginable.' The psychiatrist who made the tape then gave him a pile of 'dirty' books containing images of nude men and a crate of Guinness to drink. 'They then injected me with something that made me violently sick for about an hour and they left me there,'" Price says.

He quit when the doctors told him the next stage was to attach electrodes to his penis and says, "About two months later I accepted that I was gay." A few weeks later, he saw the psychiatrist who treated him in a gay club.

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Rollo Kim