While there has been a growth in ‘hidden from history’-type research (often called archival activism), there is still little knowledge about what happened to LGBTQI people, especially women, who ended up in the psychiatric system. However, there is much less known about how they overlap. There is substantial and growing interest in LGBT history and, to a much lesser extent, psychiatric survivor history. But, we asked, what happened to women? Although female homosexuality wasn’t criminalised, unlike male homosexuality, it was still classified as a mental disorder (‘sexual deviation’) that could be medically treated. For gay men, aversion therapy involved being given emetic drugs and receiving electric shocks while they viewed naked images of men. Sarah Carr and I first met several years ago at a mental health conference when she presented a powerful account of her experiences of being a gay woman and a psychiatric survivor.Īfterwards, we spoke about a colleague’s research into gay men’s experiences of receiving aversion therapy to ‘treat’ their sexuality.
