Gay Electroshock- and Vomit-Aversion Therapy at BYU

[_harmony]

The O'Don article uses the word "force(d)" - 37 times, "choose" -3 times "chose(n)"- 5 times. He scatters about quotes seasoned with his bias notions of the great persecution of the homosexual...blah blah blah. Bottom line was that no one was forced against their will to attend BYU and receive aversion therapy, and all universities have guinea-pig-students sign a release, duh. His self-noted obsession with homosexuality and Mormons is peculiar (to say the least) totaling some "8 lineal feet". There is little credibility given his resume and the actual historic documents he provides show little worth towards any significant means of condemnation.

Maybe i missed the big apologetic "lie" on this topic, but again, i did doze off.

Whoa. There are several things wrong with the underlined statement.

1. certainly not all universities engaged in electroshock studies on homosexual men.

2. any studies done by universities always have papers written about those studies. Where is BYU's paper on the electroshock studies?

3. non-disclosure statements are definitely NOT the norm in university studies.

Good grief. Back up the bus and clarify what you really meant, because what you said is not correct.

[_Buffalo]

At one point she said that she was ready to drive up to Salt Lake City and confront one or more senior Church leaders (BKP was mentioned specifically) while well armed. The idea was actually discussed briefly and dropped. The rental contract on the car was up and she didn't have a 12 gauge with her.

Lovely. A group of exmormons contemplating murder.

It's only okay when the Danites do it, amirite?

[_DrW]

At one point she said that she was ready to drive up to Salt Lake City and confront one or more senior Church leaders (BKP was mentioned specifically) while well armed. The idea was actually discussed briefly and dropped. The rental contract on the car was up and she didn't have a 12 gauge with her.

Lovely. A group of exmormons contemplating murder.

Not at all. More like a group of former members of a cult (which had lied to them and their offspring) discussing a meaningful encounter with one or more of the misguided cult leaders regarding outrageous cult policies and consequent outcomes.

As I said, the idea was discussed briefly and dropped. If you were acquainted with the former Molly Mormon female involved, you would understand that no mayhem was contemplated, only a confrontation, a dose of reality, and a polite request for some truthful answers from a delusional (and I would personally say, evil) old man who very recently claimed that God would never make anyone like her bright and successful son.

[_Nomad]

Lovely. A group of exmormons contemplating murder.

Not at all. More like a group of former members of a cult (which had lied to them and their offspring) discussing a meaningful encounter with one or more of the misguided cult leaders regarding outrageous cult policies and consequent outcomes.

As I said, the idea was discussed briefly and dropped. If you were acquainted with the former Molly Mormon female involved, you would understand that no mayhem was contemplated, only a confrontation, a dose of reality, and a polite request for some truthful answers from a delusional (and I would personally say, evil) old man who very recently claimed that God would never make anyone like her bright and successful son.

All I can say is that it's a good thing exmormons don't have the power to do what they secretly want to do. I'm sure your solution to the "Mormon problem" would be a final one. The discussion you had in the rental car is telling in that respect.

[_Buffalo]

All I can say is that it's a good thing exmormons don't have the power to do what they secretly want to do. I'm sure your solution to the "Mormon problem" would be a final one. The discussion you had in the rental car is telling in that respect.

Don't worry Will. In the body count competition, Mormons always win.

[Guest]

All I can say is that it's a good thing exmormons don't have the power to do what they secretly want to do. I'm sure your solution to the "Mormon problem" would be a final one. The discussion you had in the rental car is telling in that respect.

Actually, what most ex-mormons I know want is simply some kind of accounting from the Church as to why they were lied to, and continue to be lied to, why their tithing was collected and spent without any accountability whatsoever, and why the Church leaders continue to preach that certain classes of human beings (the list changes, but does not go away) are somehow unworthy, defective, or even cursed.

So, my solution to the Mormon Problem (and make no mistake, there is a Mormon Problem) would be to somehow motivate the rank and file members to simply grow up. Mormonism strives to keep the rank and file members in an ignorant, childlike state (arrested development) so that they don't feel so bad when asked to simply pray, pay and obey.

You see, no malevolent intent whatsoever - just a strong desire to help our fellow human beings.

by the way, I also know ex-mormons who don't give a rat's about the Church. These are the truly lucky ones, usually converts who figured it out within a few months or years and got out without losing a lot.

[_Nomad]

All I can say is that it's a good thing exmormons don't have the power to do what they secretly want to do. I'm sure your solution to the "Mormon problem" would be a final one. The discussion you had in the rental car is telling in that respect.

Actually, what most ex-Mormons I know want is simply some kind of accounting from the Church as to why they were lied to, and continue to be lied to, why their tithing was collected and spent without any accountability whatsoever, and why the Church leaders continue to preach that certain classes of human beings (the list changes, but does not go away) are somehow unworthy, defective, or even cursed.

I understand it's not enough to just leave. You want to make them pay for what they have supposedly done to you.

So, my solution to the Mormon Problem (and make no mistake, there is a Mormon Problem) would be [to] somehow motivate the rank and file members [to] simply grow up.

Big enough to carry a 12 gauge, I imagine.

Mormonism strives to keep the rank and file members in an ignorant, childlike state (arrested development) so that they don't feel so bad when asked to simply pray, pay and obey.

I get it. Mormons don't choose to live their religion of their own free will, so you're going to liberate them.

You see, no malevolent intent whatsoever - just a strong desire to help our fellow human beings.

How noble.

[_Buffalo]

The longterm effects of the electric shock "therapy" these men were subjected to has been crippling. Two of the men committed suicide soon after completing this torturous study. Every survivor I have interviewed has suffered life-long emotional, spiritual, and sometimes physical damage. In 1999, John Cameron, one of the 14 men who went through this horrific experience in 1976 when he was a 23 year old BYU student and member of the Young Ambassadors, wrote to me, "For 22 years now I have lived with the scars of the experience - unable to articulate a personal suffering and longing that have almost crippled me....I didn't completely come out of the closet until I was 34, and only after much angry, pissed-off therapy. I spent a lot of money just so I could yell at my psychologist and break things in his office for an hour every week for two years. But it was a hell of a lot more fun than Ford McBride and the electrodes." [166]

A Gay psychology intern at BYU named Ray actually assisted in giving elcectric shock therapy to fellow Gay men in the late 1970s. In an interview he did for Sean Weakland's documentary on aversive therapies at BYU called Legacies, Ray gave the following report on his activities and their results (which I quote here extensively because Ray has so much "insider" knowledge):

"A lot of times BYU security would catch people in compromising positions on campus. Those people would have the choice to either be kicked out of school and have their families notified about what they had done or they could go through this therapy. We had quite a few people who were going through it. There were others in the therapy who felt so much guilt for being the way they were or they had been promised that if they underwent the therapy they would be able to marry and have children and they would be turned. Of course they had to have the desire to change, and if the therapy failed (which it always did), it was their fault for the failure since they didn't have enough desire.

"Anyway, they would come in usually three times a week. I would be behind a glass one-way mirror, and they would be on the other side of it. They had their choice to look at pornographic magazines or watch porno videos. We would tape electrodes to their groin, thigh, chest and armpits. We had another machine that would monitor their breathing and heart rate. If there was a difference in their heart rate when looking at homosexual pornography, we would turn a dial which would send a current to shock them. If they were a new patient, we would use a very low current. From the reaction that I saw there were muscle spasms which looked very painful.

"After that was over, we would switch the pornography over so that it was a man and a woman having sex, and we would play very soothing music in the background to try and get the mind to relate to that. For the people that had been doing the therapy longer we turned the voltage way up so that you could see burn marks on the skin and quite often they would also throw up during the therapy. This is speculation, but most of the students at BYU probably hadn't even seen pornography before.

"After undergoing that kind of pain over a number of months, everyone said that they had completely changed. They kept records for as long as the people were at BYU. After they had graduated, there was no records kept to see what kind of success rate they had. The BYU statistics were wrong because the people were lying. They were desperate to get their degree and get out of the situation. They had been blackmailed into the situation in the first place.

"We did have some people who became completely asexual after undergoing the therapy. But no, we never changed anyone from gay to straight....We had several people who committed suicide during the therapy. We had three different people who hung themselves in the Harris Fine Arts Center on BYU campus." [167]

In the late 1970s, Carol Lynn Pearson, a famous Mormon poet whose husband Gerald Pearson was Gay, met one of Gerald's Gay friends at BYU named Sam. Sam told Carol Lynn that "they strapped me in a chair and attached wires to me. Then they showed me porno movies of men in sexual activity. When I got turned on, they gave me a shock." At first they just shocked his hands. "After that they added my forearms, and then my calves and thighs. That was when they started cranking up the voltage. I had to go in two or three times a week....Only it didn't work. All I wanted was not to touch anybody, not to be with anybody. I felt like I was being turned into a zombie. I would walk down the street and be freaked by everyone. The idea of touching anyone, even my family, made me sick." After enduring several "treatments", Sam started to question his participation in his own torture. "I made myself walk up those steps and go into that building and sit down in that chair. And take the shocks. Until I gave up....There were burns on my arms but inside there was nothing different. Nothing! Just more pain." Sam left and never went back.

Later, Sam told Gerald and Carol Lynn Pearson about another Gay BYU student named John who had committed suicide after going through electric shock treatments at BYU. After leaving BYU both Sam and John had decided to move to Los Angeles together, although just as friends, not lovers. "We were going to drop everything and go make a new life. [John] told that to the General Authority that was on his case, and the man told him he'd be better off at the bottom of the Great Salt Lake with a millstone tied around his neck than to stay a homosexual. John believed him. He believed everything they said to him. He drove back to Provo, told his roommates he was going to the laundromat, drove up Rock Canyon, laid out a blanket, and blew his brains out." Sam fared almost as badly as John. In 1981, after leaving a Gay bar in San Francisco, without any warning he was attacked in a vicious anti-Gay hate crime by two young men wielding a crow bar. He nearly died when they smashed his head in. Sam went through five major surgeries and $70,000 in plastic surgery to repiece his face together again. He was also blinded in one eye, which was replaced by a glass eye.[167A]

I also personally recall an Affirmation meeting in 1988 when a man showed up calling himself only David. He sat alone in a corner during our meeting and became extremely jittery when anyone approached him. I spoke with him but he requested that I remain at least six feet in distance away from him. He then rolled up his shirt sleeves and showed me his arms. The deeply-scarred skin on the inside of his arms looked like raw hamburger and I almost vomitted from the sight. He informed me that he had participated in electric shock therapy at BYU in 1977 and had been allowed to turn up the voltage as high as he wanted to. The results were badly burned arms and a complete inability to come physically close to any male without him emotionally breaking down from the trauma. His homosexual desires were as strong as ever but he was unable to touch another man even for a simple hug, he had no heterosexual desires whatsoever, and he was constantly on the verge of suicide. David never returned to Affirmation and I suspect from his fragile emotional state that he did not survive his ordeal for much longer. I also met two Lesbians in 1990 at the Gay Pride festivities in Salt Lake who claimed that they had also gone through electric shock therapy at BYU in the 1970s but I was not able to conduct a formal interview and we lost contact. That is the only knowledge I have of women being subjected to this torturous treatment at the hands of so-called therapists.

Those who authorized this treatment should have served jail time. Sick, sick, sick.

[Guest]

-

[Guest]

-