by Mark Schoofs

About the author: Mark Schoofs writes for the Village Voice.

Historian James Steakley is describing how doctors used to lobotomize gay men. The instrument “looked like a knitting needle,” he says, “a mechanical scalpel-like thing that would mush up your gray matter. They would target the sexual center of the brain. Later they changed to an electronic tip, so they could burn it out.”

Lobotomy was only one “cure” for homosexuality. Castration was another. In the U.S., doctors practiced hormone “therapy” on gay men and removed the clitoris from lesbians. American doctors also tried electroshock therapy and, as late as the 1970s, “aversion therapy,” in which gay men were shown male pornography while being injected with drugs that caused them to...