Curing queers'

Mental nurses and their patients, 1935–74

Tommy Dickinson

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781784990619
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Englische Literaturkritik

Drawing on a rich array of source materials including previously unseen, fascinating (and often quite moving) oral histories, archival and news media sources, 'Curing queers' examines the plight of men who were institutionalised in British mental hospitals to receive 'treatment' for homosexuality and transvestism, and the perceptions and actions of the men and women who nursed them. It examines why the majority of the nurses followed orders in administering the treatment – in spite of the zero success-rate in 'straightening out' queer men – but also why a small number surreptitiously defied their superiors by engaging in fascinating subversive behaviours. 'Curing queers' makes a significant and substantial contribution to the history of nursing and the history of sexuality, bringing together two sub-disciplines that combine only infrequently. It will be of interest to general readers as well as scholars and students in nursing, history, gender studies, and health care ethics and law.

1

Oppression and suppression of the sexual deviant, 1939–1967

I would sometimes question the treatments we were giving. […] Then I would get home and turn on the television […] and all over it was either ‘homosexuals should be accepted’, or ‘homosexuality is illegal, it is wrong, these people are irredeemable.’ And thank goodness; ‘psychiatry is trying to do something about it.’ […] I just didn’t know who was right and what was wrong, it left me very perplexed.¹

Introduction

Nurses caring for patients receiving treatments for sexual deviations received mixed and muddled messages regarding their patients’ place in society. Public debate surrounding sexual deviations refocused on to issues of aetiology rather than punishment, in a highly charged discourse which centred on finding a cure.² This chapter draws upon publications within the medical press and news media, along with literary, film, legal and sociological depictions of homosexuality to explore the complex social and cultural climate in which the homosexuals, transvestites and mental nurses were living from the 1930s to the 1960s. In doing so, it offers a context to explain why treatments for sexual deviations came to be developed and implemented.

World War II

The start of World War II and mobilisation meant that men who had never been away from home suddenly found themselves on the move. They were mixing with other people of their own age and were responsible only to themselves – it is not surprising to find that the war created new sexual experiences and shaped more liberal attitudes towards variations in sexual desires.³ During the first year of the war many male nurses were called up for military service and assigned to the Royal Army Medical Corps.⁴ When the war ended many returned to the mental hospitals and numerous ex-service personnel who had not previously worked in mental health were noted to join the profession owing to limited employment opportunities.⁵ Nolan argues that one of the main attractions of mental nursing to demobilised soldiers was the military-style atmosphere of the hospitals and their excellent sporting facilities.⁶ Julian Wills was called up for military service during the war, and after demobilisation went on to train as a mental nurse. He recalls working with a fellow soldier during the war who was homosexual:

I remember one young chap who I served with in the 1940 Campaign in France. He was overtly camp and didn’t really hide it. He was a good source of entertainment for us; he could always be relied upon to lighten the mood. I had never met an overtly gay person before, but if he ‘had my back’ then I had his I suppose. It opened my mind and I was less prejudiced against it. That is why I really struggled once I was expected to administer aversion therapies to the poor chaps later on.⁷

On the home front in World War II, the blackout in major cities provided cover for erotic encounters, with Quentin Crisp noting: ‘When the blackout came, London became a vast double bed.’⁸ Bert Sutcliffe a Canadian soldier stationed in England for six months in 1942 was overwhelmed by the sexual possibilities offered in wartime London: ‘I suddenly found out that Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus were just hotbeds of gay bars. Just jam-packed with them. In London you could have almost had sex twenty-four hours a day.’⁹ Indeed, despite its prime target for the Luftwaffe, London managed to sustain its leading position as the metropolis of queer sociability.¹⁰ Meanwhile, ‘Roy’ recalled Edinburgh being ‘full of sailors’ who were ‘quite easy; quite quite easy. The place was as if the world had gone mad because it was so easy.’¹¹ Many of the testimonies of gay men who lived during the war pertain to a sense of living for the moment – death may have been imminent for each of them, and this necessarily changed the way they and many others responded to sexual possibility: moral codes, old inhibitions, class divisions and customs were compromised in certain places and at certain times.

Herbert Bliss, who received aversion therapy in the 1960s, recalled his wartime experiences. He joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1939 at the age of 19, but was captured by the Japanese during the fall of Singapore and spent the rest of the war in prisoner of war (PoW) camps; he recalls such transcending of class divisions and the tolerance of his colleagues:

We all just got on with it, we had a common goal, which was to beat Hitler and the Japanese, and that was it, really. I had had what you might call a fairly privileged background, but I was working alongside the ‘salt of the Earth’ type people and it didn’t bother me or them – class didn’t come into war. In the PoW camp I met a young chap from Liverpool. He had been a builder’s labourer before the war and we became lovers. The other lads in the camp knew and just turned a blind eye to it really. After a while, he was sent to another camp, though. I tracked him down after the war and we met up again; but it wasn’t the same. He had decided that he wanted to get married and have kids, and that it was the segregation from females that had developed his homosexual feelings. I was upset, but I understood. We still remained friends, though. In fact I’m godfather to his daughter.¹²

As we have seen from the testimony of Julian Wills above, overtly camp¹³ gay men could find themselves relatively accepted in the services. Jo Denith recalls a homosexual colleague under his command. Denith notes that immediately before they disembarked from the landing craft during the D-Day landings his colleague began to daub his lips with lipstick and, when asked to explain his actions, said, ‘I must look pretty for the Germans.’ Denith recalled that everybody on board erupted in laughter.¹⁴ Meanwhile, John Beardmore, an officer in the Navy, recalls Freddy, who was a coder on his ship. He had the job of relaying messages from the captain to the rest of the ship:

During moments of high drama he sometimes diffused the tension by camping it up. So when the captain issued orders to open fire, he simply repeated ‘open fire dear’, which would crack up the troops. He … was immensely popular on the ship – everybody loved him and he loved everybody else.¹⁵

Freddy and the colleague described by Denith provided light relief for the troops. It is interesting to note that John, who related the story about Freddy, also identified himself as homosexual. However, he clearly saw himself as being in a different category to Freddy, which could be due to the fact he was an officer, and men in higher ranks had to be especially cautious.¹⁶ This highlights the hidden and complex impact of class within homosexual culture.¹⁷ There appear to be some similarities between this wartime pattern and the dynamic between the more effeminate homosexual lower-ranking nurses and their senior administrators, who were also homosexual, in mental hospitals during the study period. This will be explored in Chapter 2.

Cook argues that such ‘campery’ could be tolerated and enjoyed in the forces.¹⁸ Nevertheless, while sexual contact between people of the same sex appears to have been fairly common in the forces, and some had a more liberal attitude towards this, it still remained furtive and secret. Being caught would mean a certain court martial and subsequent disgrace, not only for having committed a ‘crime’ but, furthermore, because the ejection from the post meant that the individual was not ‘doing his bit’.¹⁹ Indeed, courts martial for sex between men increased during the war years – rising from 48 in 1939 to 324 in 1944/45.²⁰ Moreover, pathological, psychological and psychoanalytical interpretations and analysis of homosexuality can be seen to be appearing on both sides of the Atlantic during World War II.

Psychiatrists within the US army were promoting the concept that homosexuality was a pathology and making a concerted effort to eradicate homosexuals from their ranks.²¹ Psychiatrists tried to detect homosexual men at induction stations either by their ‘effeminate looks or behaviour or by repeating certain “homonyms” (words from the homosexual vocabulary) and watching for signs of recognition’.²² These arbitrary homonyms were: ‘blow’, ‘fairy’, ‘French’, ‘fruit’, ‘queer’, ‘rear’, ‘suck’, ‘pansy’ and ‘Greek’.²³ However, a problem arose when men who did not want to fight faked homosexuality in order to be discharged. Therefore, diagnostic tests were devised, including one by Nicolai Giosca, which was published after the war. Giosca came to the scientifically dubious notion that homosexual men did not display a gag reflex when a tongue depressor was put in their throat.²⁴ A. C. Cornsweet, a commander in the US Naval Reserve, and Dr Hayes, an army physician, conducted a survey among 200 homosexual men. They concluded that they had discovered a specific reaction common to all those ‘confirmed to the practice of sexual oralism’. This constituted a localisation of pleasure which could only be described by a true homosexual.²⁵

There were also studies describing the characteristics of homosexuals. George Henry studied thirty-three homosexual mental patients. He concluded that the homosexual male is characterised by a feminine carrying angle of the arm, long legs, narrow hips, large...