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Anecdotal evidence of the testimonies of patients who received treatments for sexual deviations and medical attitudes towards them are scattered in the recorded accounts of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, intersex and queer/questioning (GLBTIQ) people. This book 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 explores 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. The book is specifically about the treatments developed for sexual deviations in the UK. Transvestism was also treated fairly widely; however, not to the same extent as homosexuality. After an examination of the oppression and suppression of the sexual deviant, the introduction of aversion therapies for sexual deviance is considered. During the 1930s-1950s, mental health care witnessed a spirit of 'therapeutic optimism' as new somatic treatments and therapies were introduced in mental hospitals. The book also examines the impact these had on the role of mental nurses and explores how such treatments may have essentially normalised nurses to implement painful and distressing 'therapeutic' interventions . The book interprets the testimonies of these 'subversive nurses'. Finally, it explores the inception of 'nurse therapists' and discusses their role in administering aversion therapy.
representing slippages between them’. 3 In this respect the werewolf can be read as what Marjorie Garber, in the context of transvestism, has called a ‘third term’. For Garber, women dressed as men and vice versa are usually subsumed to one sex or the other by critical discourse, when in fact they operate as a third category in their own right. She explains: The ‘third’ is that which questions binary thinking and
perception in relation to the use of aversion therapy to ‘cure’ homosexuality and transvestism. 1 ‘Curing queers’ In this way, it seeks to offer fresh insight into both patients’ and nurses’ perspectives on these treatments. It uses testimonies of patients and nurses to explore the subject in ways that have not been attempted before, and to texture more broadly focused histories of these treatments and this period. This echoes recent moves towards micro-histories particularly when looking at sexuality and nursing, as a way of framing and answering questions about
those feelings in terms of homosexual or heterosexual transvestism.6 Over the next ten years, the US national picture changed from one of no significant institutional support for transsexual endocrinology, therapy, and surgery to a situation where by 1975 about twenty major medical centres were offering treatment and some thousand transsexuals had been provided with surgery.7 Though the early focus was on what are now termed trans women (then called REAY (Sex in the Archives) PRINT.indd 132 08/08/2018 15:44 the diaries of louis graydon sullivan ale
The archive has assumed a new significance in the history of sex, and this book visits a series of such archives, including the Kinsey Institute’s erotic art; gay masturbatory journals in the New York Public Library; the private archive of an amateur pornographer; and one man’s lifetime photographic dossier on Baltimore hustlers. The subject topics covered are wide-ranging: the art history of homoeroticism; casual sex before hooking-up; transgender; New York queer sex; masturbation; pornography; sex in the city. The duality indicated by the book’s title reflects its themes. It is an experiment in writing an American sexual history that refuses the confines of identity sexuality studies, spanning the spectrum of queer, trans, and the allegedly ‘normal’. What unites this project is a fascination with sex at the margins, refusing the classificatory frameworks of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and demonstrating gender and sexual indecision and flexibility. And the book is also an exploration of the role of the archive in such histories. The sex discussed is located both in the margins of the archives, what has been termed the counterarchive, but also, importantly, in the pockets of recorded desire located in the most traditional and respectable repositories. The sexual histories in this book are those where pornography and sexual research are indistinguishable; where personal obsession becomes tomorrow’s archive. The market is potentially extensive: those interested in American studies, sexuality studies, contemporary history, the history of sex, psychology, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, queer studies, trans studies, pornography studies, visual studies, museum studies, and media studies.
conflict with her or his gender role enters a treatment programme for transsexuals, he argues, but is also the result of a historical development. His historical analysis of this transformation was based on his reading of the secondary histories of ‘sexual inversion’, hermaphroditism and transvestism.2 Here I hope to present a more profound analysis of that very transformation based on hermaphrodite case histories. I hope to demonstrate, that what was once a social, moral and sometimes legal conflict concerning a person inscribed as male or female whose physical sex
ideal was threatened by the concept of effeminacy and transvestism. Indeed, many simply yielded to the prevailing attitude of heterosexual domesticity, which was promoted within the film. Albert Holliday recalls how the pressure of this ‘propaganda’ largely influenced his decision to get married: It seemed that every film I watched and book I read made marriage look like such an attractive option. Maybe I was brainwashed [. . .] I didn’t want to be lonely and there were a lot of questions from my family regarding me getting married [. . .] I had met a girl at art
colourful clothes, the mini-skirt and bikini for women and long hair for men, defied conventional norms of behaviour and appearance. Popular music was changing as the glam rock era emerged and David Bowie appeared as the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust. Peter Ackroyd argues that Bowie challenged traditional gender roles and made transvestism more broadly acceptable.42 There was also the emergence of anti-establishment thinking, including challenges to the institution of psychiatry with the emergence of the ‘counter-psychiatry’ movement.43 The ‘counter
‘Tale of the Spaniard’ Alonzo di Monçada in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Alonzo is relating to John Melmoth, in painstaking detail, the story of his escape from the monastery into which he had been coerced by his parents. While Alonzo and his accomplice, the parricide, are concealed in an underground vault, the latter recites a story of transvestism, cross-dressing and
’s class. This becomes important in movies. Theatre was tenuously exempted from these laws except in the eyes of hard-line Puritans: The stage was a privileged site of transgression, in which two kinds of transvestism were permitted to players: changes of costume that violated edicts against wearing the clothing of the