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By Root 859 0

these were books of classical mythology, which told of men unfurling into birds, women melting into fountains. Then my formal literary education began—Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, alongside Shonagon, Murasaki, Kawakami. During law school, I reread these books to keep the law at bay. Then I found books inside the law, like Bill’s casebook, that found their way inside me. On the first page of his Confessions, Rousseau says he will hold that book when he goes to meet his Creator. I do not think of the books I will hold so much as of those that will hold me, that will hold me up.

Almost all the books that are important to me give me pleasure. One exception is Jonathan Ned Katz’s Gay American History. Published in 1976, when gay studies was a fledgling and fugitive enterprise, Katz’s work is a seven-hundred-page compilation of historical documents. I discovered it as a second-year law student, about the time I read Bill’s casebook. Yet while I read and reread Bill’s book, I found Katz’s book, with its scarlet covers, difficult to revisit.

The difficulty lay in the chapter titled “Treatment: 1884–1974,” which gathers documents describing attempts to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals. Perhaps the most disturbing accounts involve invasive surgery. Katz includes the case history of Guy T. Olmstead, who voluntarily underwent castration in 1894 to overcome his love for another man, William Clifford. Olmstead states: “Since the operation there has never been a day that I have been free from sharp, shooting pains down the abdomen to the scrotum.” Nonetheless, he deems the operation a success: “I have absolutely no passion for other men, and have begun to hope now that I can yet outlive my desire for Clifford.”

Lobotomies, which present-day conversion advocate Robert Kronemeyer says were administered “promiscuously” in the 1950s and 1960s, are also represented here. In a 1941 procedure, a needle inserted into the anterior part of the brain “was swept downward toward the orbital plate and upward toward the vertex.” The procedure was “repeated in order to make sure that the pathways were cut.” The doctors reviewing the operation observe the patient was diagnosed as psychotic in 1945 and demented in 1947. The absence of intervening factors forced the doctors to conclude the lobotomy had caused the dementia.

Electricity was an alternative to knives. A 1935 presentation before the American Psychological Association cautioned that electroshock treatment would not convert homosexuals unless shocks were administered at “intensities considerably higher than those usually employed on human subjects.” A patient describes a 1964 electroshock treatment as follows:

You’re in your pajamas, and you just lie down on a table. Then you don’t remember any more because they give you a shock. The shock itself erases anything you were experiencing before, any memory of it. I had seventeen shock treatments—I did have awareness enough to ask one of the nurses how many times I had had it, and she said, “I’ll look it up.” She said seventeen.…

I do remember after my own shock treatment listening to other people having shock treatment. I don’t think that should be allowed. I was in the next ward. You hear that horrible scream. There’s one loud scream—“Ahhhhh!!!”—very loud, each time they give you a shock, as the lungs are being evacuated. You hear what sounds like hundreds of people having shock treatment. They always did it in the morning, it went on all morning, three hours of those loud, single screams, one person at a time.

I’m struck by the limits of the patient’s resistance: what he thinks should not “be allowed” is his exposure to the shock therapy of others, not his own treatment. He can hear their screams more clearly than his own.

Gentler clinicians worked only on the psyche. A 1963 account of hypnotic aversion therapy instructs doctors to use the “fastidious” nature of gay men to forge an association between the patient’s “disgust reactions” and the male body. A similar 1967 study contains the following sample instruction:

I want you to