The Daily Agenda for Friday, May 8

Jim Burroway

May 8th, 2015

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Joensuu, Finland; Maspalomas, Gran Canaria; São Paulo, Brazil; Växjö, Sweden.

AIDS Walk This Weekend: Anaheim, CA; Buffalo, NY; Ft. Wayne, IN; Poughkeepsie, NY.

Other Events This Weekend: Purple Party, Dallas, TX; BeachBear Weekend, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; Splash, Houston, TX.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From Christopher Street, June 1977, page 47.

THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
The Stronger the Shock, the Better the Cure: 1973. A nondescript office park in the northeast Atlanta suburb of North Druid Hills was home to Barry A. Tanner’s Center for Behavioral Change. Among the behaviors Tanner was trying to change was homosexual behavior. As Tanner was a Behavioral Therapist, it appears likely that, as was common with Behavioral Therapists throughout the U.S., he believed that all psychological problems were strictly behavioral problems that could be solved through retraining the patient through behavioral modification techniques. (For more information about Behavioral Therapy, see our report Blind Man’s Bluff, a part of our award-winning series .What Are Little Boys Made Of?)

Tanner’s preferred method was electric shock aversion therapy, and his methods were particularly invasive and, for this experiment, painful. And in a paper he published in the journal Behaviour Research and Therapy for May 1973, he wrote that the more painful the shock — and the more the patients feared the pain of the shock — the more desirable the results. Previous research by other Behavioral Therapists advocated a minimal level of electric shock, but Tanner’s goal was to prove that high shock levels would be more effective.

For Tanner’s experiments, twenty-six men answered newspaper ads “for a free research and treatment program,” and were randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group was the 5 milliampere high-shock group, and the other group were allowed to chose their own shock levels. All but one who were allowed to choose selected a level lower than 5 mA — generally in the 3 to 4.5 mA region. The men in both groups were hooked up to electrodes — he doesn’t say where — and a measurement device was attached to their penises to measure changes in circumference. Slides were projected on a screen of attractive nude men and women. When a male slide was projected on the screen, the subject was shocked. No shocks were delivered if a woman’s picture was up. And that contraption attached to the penis? That’s how Tanner decided if the experiment was working. If penile growth was detected while a a male slide was on the screen, then the experiment was going the wrong way. A greater heterosexual response — or at least, a lesser homosexual one — constituted success. Each session went on like this for 45 minutes. The full program consisted of twenty sessions, three sessions each week. The subjects were also asked to rate their fear of shock on a scale from one to ten, with ten represented the greatest amount of fear.

The results were somewhat confusing. Tanner described recruiting twenty-six gay men for his experiment, but he supplies data for only twenty of them. He doesn’t say what happened to the other six. Twelve were in the high-shock group, and eight were allowed to select their own shock levels. Unsurprisingly, fully half of the high-shock group didn’t make it through all twenty sessions. Five of the six who dropped out didn’t stick around beyond third. Only two of the six in the select-your-own-punishment group dropped out — although, as I said, he doesn’t explain the missing six from the original twenty-eight. His results?

The results support the earlier findings of animal research, that avoidance learning improves at higher shock intensities. Men receiving 5 mA of current showed greater change in a heterosexual direction than did men receiving from 3 to 4.5. mA of current (p = 0.047). The prediction of MacCulloch et al. that effective learning requires only a minimally aversive stimulus was, therefore, not supported.

MacCulloch also predicted that high shock intensity would result in a higher dropout rate. However, the number of sessions attended by men receiving 5 rnA of current did not differ significantly from the number attended by men receiving less than 5 rnA (p = 0.0735). Still, the difference may be great enough to warrant some consideration in clinical applications of avoidance learning.

…Since the men who completed training had a median fear rating of 4.0, while the men who dropped out had a median rating of 5.0, I suggest assigning a current flow of 5 mA to all men with a fear rating of 4 or less, while allowing men with a fear rating greater than 4 to select their own shock intensity. In addition, since most men who dropped out of training after receiving at least one shock did so comparatively early (mean sessions attended before dropping out = 7), the current level could be increased after the seventh session for those men who select their own shock intensity. Current flow might be boosted by 25 per cent or 5 mA, whichever is less, beginning with the eighth session.

The MacCulloch fellow mentioned here was Malclom J. MacCulloch, who had published a number of influential papers on “curing” gay men through electric shock since the mid-1960s. (see, for example, Jun 3). Tanner thought MacCulloch was going soft on his subjects by using lower current levels. As for Tanner, he thought that perhaps 5 mA wasn’t high enough:

The selection of a 5-mA maximum may be premature, since up to 10 rnA has been reported with human avoidance training with no apparent ill effects (Birk et al., 1971) and Craven (1970) has stated that a minimum of 20 mA is required for a prolonged period before painful muscular contraction wiII occur, I selected 5 mA as the maximum current in my work simply because I personally could tolerate little more than that, and the proposed research ethics of the American Psychological Association recommend that E (Experimenter) stimulate himself before each training session to insure that his equipment is in working order.

[Source: Barry A. Tanner. “Shock intensity and fear of shock in the modification of homosexual behavior in males by avoidance learning.” Behaviour Research and Therapy 11, no. 2 (May 1973): 213-218.]

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
95 YEARS AGO: Tom of Finland: 1920-1991. Born Touko Laaksonen, Tom of Finland was famous for his stylized homoerotic and fetish art. Over a forty year career, he produced some 3,500 drawings in his unique exaggerated style. If Barbie dolls proportions represent an anatomically impossible ideal for women, Tom of Finland’s hypermasculine characters were portrayed in similarly fantastical idealizations of manly men, although Tom didn’t see it that way. “All my drawings are grounded in reality,” he said. “I use models, whom I initially photograph and then later refer to when I draw. People complain that I exaggerate. My fantasies often take over, of course, but I want to offer the viewer something that he can’t get in a photograph.”

His style was partly influenced by beefcake and physique magazines which skirted on the edges of U.S. censorship codes in the 1950s and 1960s. But as the codes were struck down in the 1960s over First Amendment issues, his drawings became more explicit and more overtly sexual. They became the definitive style guide for leathermen through his portrayal of policemen, lumberjacks, sailors and bikers, and they’ve inspired such artists as Robert Mapplethorpe (see Nov 4), Freddie Mercury (see Sep 5) and the Village People.

He died of a stroke brought on by emphysema on November 7, 1991. Several examples of his “dirty drawings ” — his unabashed description for them — have been acquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. This past winter, works by Tom of Finland and “physique” photographer Bob Mizer (see Mar 27) were featured in a special exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. On September 8 of this year, his native Finland will honor him with a set of postage stamps which have been described as ” considerably more erotic than those usually seen on any nation’s envelopes.” A documentary film of his life is in the works and is slated for a 2015 release.

Darren Hayes: 1972. The singer-songwriter was the front man of Savage Garden. Their 1997 album by the same name peaked at #1 in Australia, #2 in the U.K., #3 in the U.S. Their biggest American hit was “Truly Madly Deeply.” Their follow-up album yielded another #1 hit in the U.S. with “I Knew I Loved You.” In 2002, he launched his solo career, and by 2005 it was clear that Savage Garden was through.

Hayes married his childhood sweetheart in 1997. They divorced in 2000 after he told her that he was gay. After years of public speculation about his sexuality, Hayes came out on July 18, 2006, when he announced that he had entered a civil partnership with his boyfriend, Richard Cullen, a month earlier. In April, 2007, he told The Advocate, “First of all, it took me a long time to even accept that I was gay. And then it took me a long time to be happy that I was gay.” That summer he headlined London’s Gay Pride at Trafalgar Square. You can see his video for “It Gets Better” here. His fourth solo album, Secret Codes and Battleships, was released in 2011. He and Cullen upgraded their partnership in 2013 to full marriage soon after same-sex marriage resumed in California.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

Josh

May 8th, 2015

Some of those Tanner quotes are confusing. He says there’s no statistical difference between those who dropped out in the two groups, but then recommends people be assigned to one group or the other based on fear rating, apparently to prevent drop-outs.

It’s also odd that half of one group dropped out and a quarter of the other did, yet he decided to look only at the number of sessions attended. If half of your patients leave, I don’t know how you can think your overall design is sound.

I feel I should emphasize this “statistical analysis” has 6 data points per group. That’s… tiny. His Table 1 lists summary outcomes, namely the increase in penis girth (in mm) when viewing naked females at the end compared to the beginning minus the same increase for naked males. (Positive numbers for more heterosexual, negative for more homosexual.) 2 of the 6 people in the 5 mA group dwarfed the rest in change–+1.745 and +1.299 vs. +0.610, +0.247, +0.236, and +0.059. Compared to the less than 5 mA group, this is indeed pretty clearly larger; they had +0.375, +0.133, +0.123, +0.097, +0.066, +0.000. But it’s also clear from the first data that there can be enormous differences between people. It should perhaps also be emphasized that these differences are fractions of a millimeter. In that vein, he makes no attempt at quantifying the magnitude of change in orientation; his conclusion is merely that an increase in heterosexual response was associated with being in the higher shock group. His “success” was that he could, with decent statistical likelihood, increase your penis girth when exposed to naked female images. This likely would only be a fraction of a millimeter, and who knows if it would have any bearing on real-world sexual behavior, but the weakness of the result is glossed over.

If he had included graphs instead of tables, his data would have been rather laughable.

He had a followup a year later (suggested at the conclusion of the article this article quotes) titled “Avoidance Training with and without Booster Sessions to Modify Homosexual Behavior in Males”. The key result: as far as boosters were concerned, “None of the one-tailed U or t tests achieved significance at the .05 level for the seven change measures under investigation.” Upon ignoring booster sessions and pooling data from both boosted and non-boosted groups (a whole 10 guys at this point…), some statistics achieved significance: “These tests were significant for five of the seven measures, suggesting that the lack of difference between the two conditions was due to the booster sessions adding nothing to an already effective procedure.” By far the most significant statistic was frequency of sexual relations with women minus those with men over the previous year, which favored women afterwards. Assigning causation for that to the shock therapy is problematic for a variety of reasons, and he listed just one summary statistic so we can’t see the distribution. I also just feel that if these guys had had a very obvious heterosexual change due the therapy, Tanner would have followed up on it (he ends the second paper suggesting that his results should be replicated with a larger sample size). I found no such follow-up, by him or anyone else.

Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but it seems Tanner was getting a PhD around the time these studies were published. Perhaps he needed to get something out the door and despite weak results he did what he could. His papers don’t seem to have lies per-se, the results are just open to lots of criticism and the conclusions are not strong.

Eric Payne

May 8th, 2015

How benign can this be made to sound?

In the summer of 1975, when I was 16 and my mother was made aware I made a pass at a local farmer’s son (he was at our far for a week, harvesting the corn my father let his father grow on our land, and was just friggin’ gorgeous), I was subjected to electric-shock “therapy” at Philhaven Mental Hospital, in Lebanon, PA.

The procedure:

The patient arrives at the doctor’s hospital office with parent. That was important — if a parent was not present, the session was canceled and rescheduled.

From the moment the patient arrives, they are under guard by parent and/or staff. The patient is allowed to do nothing alone; even going to the bathroom, a staff member or parent must be in accompaniment.

The patient completely disrobes… in front of parent and/or staff member. Five electrodes are attached to the patient’s chest, three in an arc above the heart, one, each, on each of the nipples. The three on the chest are attached to an electrocardiograph machine, the nipples are connected to the power source.

An electrode is attached to that area of skin between the testicles and the sphincter.

Two more electrodes are attached to the legs, one on each leg, To measure blood flow in the vein and artery.

And an electrode is placed on the underside of the penis. This electrode, and the one between the legs, attached to the power source.

The patient is then allowed to put on a hospital gown. While the parent is taken to the control room/viewing area, the patient is taken into the treatment room.

My treatment room had a small table with a slide projector on it, a small screen on the far wall, a chair at the table for the tech and a padded chair beside the table for the patient. When the patient sits, the various dangling leads are hooked up to two machines.

The nurse/tech enters the room; at the back of the room is the glass window from which the patient’s doctor and parent are watching.

The lights dim.

The tech, now sitting in darkness to the patient’s left, reads the script: The electrocardiograph will measure the patient’s responses to various stimuli, though responses to questions from the therapist may be evaluated by the therapist independent of the electrocardiograph. This is being done as the patient has shown “an alarming tendency” to make “wrong choices” despite the patient’s parents’ “best efforts” with the patient.

(A personal note: even then, I was a little pissed off most that this was all about them, and the sacrifices they had to make for their children, just so all their kids would “grow up right.”)

The therapy is explained: The patient will be asked a series of questions, and shown a series of photographs. Based on the “response” of the patient, the patient may be subjected to “negative impulse stimulus,” to assist the patient in recognizing “negative behaviors.”

Then follows a series of innocuous questions (“Would you rather grow corn or flowers?”, “Would you rather spend time with your father or mother?”) and show a series of photographs.

During the first session, the questions are dumb; the images nothing more outrageous than classmates’ yearbook pictures. The “negative impulse stimulus” is nothing more than a warmth on the chest or “down there,” a feeling not unlike applying Ben-Gay to those same areas.

Session scheduling was completely dependent on how “stubborn” the doctor believed the patient to be; monthly sessions, the doctor said, were for those who needed “refreshers,” but had mostly learned how to make “right” decisions in their lives; weekly was the average recommendation, but the especially stubborn could be admitted to the hospital by the parent for daily sessions. My schedule was weekly; the doctor assured my mother I would be able to change my behaviors by my mid-August birthday and, certainly, by the start of the new school year.

The second week the same ritual is observed, but the gentle warmth indicating negative stimulus was replaced by a gentle warmth that turned into a sudden, hot pinprick.

The third week. Same pre-therapy ritual, but the questions get a little more angry (“Finish this sentence: I hate my father because…”, “I’d rather bake a cake than go deer hunting, True or False?”) and the photographs of gotten a little more hardcore… interspersed with the class pictures are pictures of shirtless men and boys. The pinpricks are replaced by sudden little zaps that frighten more than they hurt.

The sixth session was my last. Same pre-therapy ritual; car rides to and from Philhaven (30 miles each way up State Route 72) have become my mother’s venting session: She’s done all she can for me and is at her wit’s end. She’s doing this for me because, as my mother, she has to do everything she can for me; it’s the law, but she’s finally had enough, and “so has your father. You are out of our house in two years when you turn 18. God, I hate you.”

The questions have become mostly True/False options (“True or false: I like gym class because I get to see my classmates naked in the shower,” or “True or false: When I see our cows mating, I get an erection.” The imagery has become pretty pornographic… well, pretty pornographic for 1970s Pennsylvania Amish Country… nude women, direct from Playboy, and nude men, from where I don’t know. I think the most intense shot was an “orgy” scene, a close up of a man, showing only his waist down. He’s got a hard-on, there’s a woman’s head poking out from around his right thigh, looking at his cock, and another man to the woman’s right, facing forward, also gazing at the dick).

At the start of the fourth session, a new tool is introduced to our sessions: a little rubber post, four or five inches in length, a couple/three inches around. The technician takes it out of it’s sealed paper container, and tells me to put it in my mouth, as some of the “negative stimulus” might cause me to bite down, suddenly, my teeth will be protected from breaking.

At this sixth session, I’m almost chewing through that rubber, I’m biting so hard. My chest feels like it’s not only on fire, but that my horse, Lucy, is stomping on it to put the fire out. I’m able to keep my sphincter shut, but it feels like there’s a puddle of sulfuric acid bubbling away at the skin behind my nuts and threatening to bubble it’s way to my asshole.

And my limp penis is doing some sort of dance, jumping around from left to right thigh and there’s this smell of bacon and my hands are balled up into fists and I just want to fucking scream and stand up and kill the nurse/tech sitting on my left and then, suddenly, it’s over. The lights come on, I start to relax. The nurse leaves the room, then re-enters with a small Dixie cup of water and my pills. It’s when she is removing the electrodes she finds… a problem.

The electrode attached to my penis either slid off the gel, or there wasn’t enough gel applied, or there wasn’t any gel applied, or… whatever. But the metal at the center of the electrode made direct contact with my skin. I’ve been burnt; a blister is already starting to rise; I’m given a topical cream and sent home. The doctor decides the next therapy session will be in two weeks; he believes I’m nearing a “break-through.”

Two weeks later, I show up, alone. My mother gave me the car and told me to go; that’s how I found out a “therapy” session would not be held without a parent in attendance. Though it was re-scheduled, the next appointment was never kept.

Richard Rush

May 8th, 2015

“. . . he [Tanner] wrote that the more painful the shock — and the more the patients feared the pain of the shock — the more desirable the results.”

Yes, of course, . . . that is exactly how torture is intended to produce results. He simply dressed it up in technical-sounding language to make it seem grounded in science ~ i.e. psychobabble.

MattNYC

May 8th, 2015

Eric, for what you and others had to suffer through, these sadists should have gone to jail. Had they been doing this on animals–at least in some places–they would have been jailed.

Another of those times I wished I believed in Hell and rape-y demons with barbs on their dicks.

Eric Payne

May 8th, 2015

Matt,

But… but… but… they’re just helping… at least that’s what my parents would tell me… with my father frequently adding, “so stop your damned crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about.”

And he meant it. Believe me.

If there were ever two people who should have been legally barred from marrying, it was my parents. By the time I was a teen-ager, it was difficult to tell who they hated more: each other or their kids.

Paul Douglas

May 9th, 2015

Eric,
OMG, what a horror story! Do you have any contact with these monsters? Unbelievable!
I’m afraid I’d be bitter.

Eric Payne

May 9th, 2015

Paul,

Both my parents are dead. I have no contact with any of my four full sisters. A half-sister whom I’ve never met and I are e-mail buddies. A paternal aunt and a first cousin are the only “family” members with whom I have any relationship.

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