He would hit the button up to 1,500 times over a three-hour session. Over the next few days, he found that it could arouse him, and he would press the button to stimulate himself “to a point that, both behaviorally and introspectively, he was experiencing an almost overwhelming euphoria and elation and had to be disconnected, despite his vigorous protests”. But then the stimulation sessions started, delivered via the button that felt most pleasurable to him. Once he had recovered from the operation, a control box was attached which enabled him, under his doctors’ supervision, to provide a one-second jolt to the brain area of his choice.īefore being given control of the electrodes, B-19 had been shown a film “displaying heterosexual foreplay and intercourse”. He and his team implanted stainless steel, Teflon-coated electrodes into nine separate regions of B-19’s brain, with wires leading back out of his skull. In 1970, B-19 ended up in the care of Robert Galbraith Heath, chair of the department of psychiatry and neurology at Tulane University, New Orleans.
One of the strangest experiments in scientific history: an attempt to use pleasure conditioning to turn a gay man straight. “All of his relationships,” wrote his doctors, with an unsparing lack of sympathy, “have been characterised by coercion, manipulation and demand.” He was depressive, suicidal, insecure, procrastinating, self-pitying and narcissistic. He had a five-year history of homosexuality, and a three-year history of drug abuse: he had tried glues, paints, thinners, sedatives, marijuana, LSD, amphetamines, even nutmeg and vanilla extract.
He had, the papers said, entered the military but had been expelled for “homosexual tendencies” within a month. He came from a military family and had had an unhappy childhood. The patient – codenamed B-19 – was, according to the two academic papers that catalogued the course of the research, a “single, white male of unremarkable gestation and birth”. And they had just become part of one of the strangest experiments in scientific history: an attempt to use pleasure conditioning to turn a gay man straight.
The woman, 21, was a prostitute from the French Quarter of New Orleans, hired by special permission of the attorney general of Louisiana. The year was 1970, and the man was a 24-year-old psychiatric patient. Soon, events took their course: they were enjoying themselves so much they could almost forget about the wires leading out of his skull. She was understanding, reassuring: let’s just lie down on the bed together, she said, and see what happens. He was nervous he’d never done this before.