Dr. Robert G. Heath: a controversial figure in the history of deep brain stimulation.

The history of psychosurgery is filled with tales of researchers pushing the boundaries of science and ethics. These stories often create a dark historical framework for some of the most important medical and surgical advancements. Dr. Robert G. Heath, a board-certified neurologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, holds a debated position within this framework and is most notably remembered for his research on schizophrenia. Dr. Heath was one of the first physicians to implant electrodes in deep cortical structures as a psychosurgical intervention. He used electrical stimulation in an attempt to cure patients with schizophrenia and as a method of conversion therapy in a homosexual man. This research was highly controversial, even prior to the implementation of current ethics standards for clinical research and often goes unmentioned within the historical narrative of deep brain stimulation (DBS). While distinction between the modern practice of DBS and its controversial origins is necessary, it is important to examine Dr. Heath's work as it allows for reflection on current neurosurgical practices and questioning the ethical implication of these advancements.

Abjection. Objection. Subjection: rethinking the history of AIDS in Australian gay men's futures.

In coining the term 'post-AIDS' some 20 years ago, I was noting the dissolution of a singular and unified experience of HIV and AIDS for gay communities that had been the case until that time. Not only were HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay men having increasingly different experiences, but divergent trajectories were opening up. Since then, many other factors have come into play, for example age and generation; the ascendancy of the biomedical and the technosexual; and the supremacy of neoliberal politics (including sexual politics). Now, if gay men are to survive as such - and there is a question about this - are there larger issues than HIV and AIDS that ought to command our attention? Or do we need to rethink how we situate HIV and AIDS within the larger framework of gay men's health and wellbeing. This might be just a question of politics, or it could be a question of theory. Are we finally returning to the original gay liberation agenda of the eradication of difference, or simply being traduced (seduced?) by our success at intimate citizenship?

Detecting and Teaching Desire: Phallometry, Freund, and Behaviorist Sexology.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Kurt Freund and other researchers developed phallometry to demonstrate the effectiveness of behaviorism in the diagnosis and treatment of male homosexuality and pedophilia. Researchers used phallometers to segment different aspects of male arousal, to discern cryptic hierarchies of eroticism, and to monitor the effectiveness of treatments to change an individual's sexuality. Phallometry ended up challenging the expectations of behaviorist researchers by demonstrating that most men could not change their sexual preferences--no matter how hard they tried or how hard others tried to change them. This knowledge, combined with challenges mounted by gay political activists, eventually motivated Freund and other researchers to revise their ideas of what counted as therapy. Phallometric studies ultimately revealed the limitations of efforts to shape "abnormal" and "normal" masculinity and heralded the rise of biologically determinist theories of sexuality.

Sexual Violence, Predatory Masculinity, and Medical Testimony in New Spain.

This essay examines the medical and legal construction of predatory masculinity in New Spain by contrasting criminal cases of rape [estupro] with those of violent or coercive sodomy [sodomía]. In the context of male-female rape, the rulings of most criminal and ecclesiastical courts imply that predatory masculinity was a "natural" manifestation of male sexual desire, whereas in cases of sodomy and nonconsensual sexual acts between men, courts viewed such desire as "against nature." The processes by which the colonial state prosecuted certain sexual crimes simultaneously criminalized and validated predatory masculinity. By analyzing the roles of the medics, surgeons, and midwives who examined the bodies of the male and female victims in these cases, this essay argues for a commonality in the authoritative judgments based on medical evidence, whether conclusive or inconclusive.

Psychology and the politics of same-sex desire in the United States: an analysis of three cases.

Psychological science has assumed an increasingly explicit role in public policies related to same-sex desire in the United States. In this article, we present a historical analysis of the relationship between policy discourse and scientific discourse on homosexuality produced within U.S. psychology over the 20th and early 21st centuries through the lens of three cases: Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), Lawrence v. Texas (2003), and Perry v. Schwarzenegger (2010). Our analysis suggests that, for the majority of its disciplinary history, psychology produced knowledge that supported a status quo of legal and cultural subordination for same-sex-attracted individuals. The discipline's shift in understanding of homosexuality, reflected in a 1975 policy statement of the American Psychological Association, reversed this relationship and opened up space for advocacy for social and political change regarding homosexuality. Our analysis of policy decisions rendered by the courts reveals the increasingly important role psychological science has assumed in challenging the legal subordination of same-sex-attracted individuals, though the basis upon which psychological science has sought to inform policy remains limited. We conclude with a critical discussion of the type of knowledge claims psychologists have traditionally used to advocate for gay and lesbian rights, suggesting the vitality of a narrative approach which can reveal the meaning individuals make of legal subordination and political exclusion.

Negotiating exclusion: MSM, identity, and blood policy in the age of AIDS.

In the US, blood donors face a variety of restrictions that leave many people excluded entirely from the donor pool. This paper explores the specific circumstances and meanings surrounding the donor ban on Men-who-have-Sex-with-Men (MSM). The ban on MSM is one of the few existing donor guidelines to receive considerable criticism on grounds that it effectively prohibits any sexually active gay man from donating blood and thus discriminates against gays. Due in part to these questions of fairness, the Blood Products Advisory Committee (BPAC) of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) met to reconsider the decades-old policy, first in 1997 and again in 2000. The FDA asked its advisory committee to address the efficacy and utility of the MSM ban in light of technological developments in blood-banking, epidemiological data on the spread of HIV, and mounting pressures from gay rights and blood-banking organizations to update the policy. Through a detailed reading of meeting and conference transcripts that took place between 1997 and 2000, I argue that 'MSM' became a contested definitional category during the FDA's reappraisal of the policy. During and between the Committee's discussions, presenters and experts debated the differences between sexual behavior and sexual identity in relation to HIV and, eventually, HHV-8, a virus known to cause Kaposi's sarcoma in immunosuppressed individuals. I argue that the underlying flexibility in the meanings behind the term 'MSM' allowed Committee members, in the end, to retract their more nuanced discussions of human behavior and HIV and to uphold the contested policy. Finally, I suggest how the debates surrounding the MSM donor ban can help us to better understand the place of sexuality in discussions and claims of biopolitical citizenship in early 21st-century America.

Health, sexuality and place: the different geographies of HIV-positive gay men in Auckland, New Zealand.

This paper employs interview narratives alongside participant-led photography and caption writing to examine the different daily geographies of 15 HIV-positive gay men in Auckland, New Zealand. Difference for these men is rooted in both their HIV status and their sexuality, and this difference has implications for their engagement with the world at a range of spatial and temporal scales. Giving voice to such experiences begins to answer calls for geographers to consider more deeply the connections between health, sexuality and place.

Public health heritage and policy: HIV and AIDS in museums and archives.

In the last five years there has been a resurgence of scholarly research and museum exhibitions on the history of HIV and AIDS. This work has called into question some of the conventions of archiving and interpreting the history of the pandemic. It is increasingly clear that a narrow range of materials have been saved. As historians and curators turn to these holdings for analysis and exhibition, they find they inadequately represent the impact of AIDS across diverse groups as well as the range of local, national, international responses. This essay considers some of the factors that shape collection of the material culture, particularly the heritage of public health, and the consequences for our understanding of lessons from the past.

[The homosexual as a "molesting personality". Nikolaus Jensch and his psychiatric-genetic studies]. / Der Homosexuelle als "störende Persönlichkeit". Nikolaus Jensch und seine psychiatrisch-genetischen Studien.

For the first time ever, this study presents facts on the biography of Nikolaus Jensch (1913 - 1964), who worked in Wroclav, Leipzig, Strasbourg and Bremen, and on his psychiatric-genetic studies on homosexuality during the Nazi regime. Jensch tried, under methodologically rather doubtful presuppositions, to separate "genuine" from so-called "pseudo-homosexuals", who for him were receptive to psychotherapeutic and educational intervention. Ultimately he aimed to establish an empiric prediction as to the heredity of homosexuality, although even that would not exculpate homosexuals from prosecution. In a different study he analysed the curing effects of castration for homosexuality and other sexual deviances. Although acknowledging the mutilating character of castration and its due to high recrudescence rates rather poor therapeutic outcome, he never pleaded to refrain from this intervention.

Discipline and Discretionary Power in Policing Homosexuality in Late Imperial St. Petersburg.

This article explores queer sexual policing in late Imperial St. Petersburg (c.1900-1917). The focus is on the street-level constables who bore the principal responsibility for policing male homosexual offenses in the city's public and semi-public spaces. This emphasis on the street-level policing of homosexuality contrasts with other discussions of gay urban history and the oppression of queer men by the authorities. The article draws on new evidence from precinct-level police archives to complement and challenge previous discussions of queer sexual policing in the Imperial capital. By taking the fate of queer men in an autocratic city, this article refines our understanding of the ways in which homosexual practices and identities emerged in modern times. Specifically, it builds on Michel Foucault's descriptions of constables as "arbiters of illegalities," where the term arbiter suggests rule-based and yet discretionary coercion. Here, the influential model of disciplinary policing of sexuality is complemented by an emphasis on the role of discretionary power in the history of homosexuality.

Johannes Heinrich Schultz and National Socialism.

BACKGROUND: Johannes Heinrich Schultz (1884-1970) established the set of techniques known as "autogenic training." From 1936 until 1945 he worked as assistant director of the Göring Institute. His role during National Socialism has been underestimated in our opinion. METHOD: We considered Schultz's academic publications and his "autobiography" from 1964. RESULTS: Schultz publicly advocated compulsory sterilization as well as the "annihilation of life unworthy of life" and developed a diagnostic scheme which distinguished between the neurotic/curable and the hereditary/ incurable. In fact, this classification was then employed to decide between life and death. In order to justify the "New German Psychotherapy" alongside eugenic psychiatry, Schultz carried out degrading and inhuman "treatments" of homosexual prisoners of concentration camps who were in mortal danger. LIMITATIONS: This study was based on written documents. We were not able to interview contemporary witnesses. CONCLUSION: By advocating compulsory sterilization and the "annihilation of life unworthy of life" and by the abuse of homosexuals as research objects Schultz violated fundamental ethical principles of psychiatry.

Life-stories and storied lives: genre and reports of lived experience in gay personal literature.

Personal literature may be written either as a life story such as an autobiography or memoir or as an autobiographical novel. Using the three volumes comprising the memoir of author Paul Monette and the three volumes comprising the autobiographical fiction trilogy of journalist and novelist Edmund White, this article explores the goal of each author for selecting a particular genre in which to write about lived experience. Each author enjoyed an elite education and came to adulthood in postwar America in the decade prior to the gay rights era beginning in the 1970s, and each writer participated in the sociosexual culture emerging over the succeeding decade. Each writer became HIV+ in the 1980s (Monette died of complications attending AIDS in 1995), and each writer experienced the loss of his lover to AIDS. While Monette and White each experienced the anti-gay prejudice of postwar American society, Monette's youth was less troubled than that of White who grew up in a complex family with a distant yet harsh father toward whom he was also sexually attracted. While Monette's goal in writing a memoir was that the suffering of his generation of gay men should be remembered, White's goal was more personal, choosing autobiographical fiction in his effort to overcome his feelings of shame about being gay founded on his desire for his father.

On our memory of gay Sullivan: a hidden trajectory.

This article examines psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan's approach to the issue of homosexuality. Sullivan (1892-1949), well-known for his interpersonal theory of mental illness, is believed to have accomplished a high recovery rate in his treatment of schizophrenia during the 1920s. Most of his patients, as well as Sullivan himself, were concerned about their "homosexual" orientations. He encouraged physical affection between male patients and male attendants, believing that it would free patients from their guilt for their "unconventional" sexuality. But he kept his compelling practice hidden, not bringing it into open discussion to confront the definition of homosexuality as "sickness." This article traces the process in which the omission of the important aspect of Sullivan's practice began during his lifetime and continued in the scholarship since. In so doing, the article suggests a nuanced understanding of this important figure in the U.S. intellectual and cultural history of homosexuality.

A social and historical perspective of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus.

This study sought to understand the various roles music played for gay men who were members of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus, the world's first gay men's chorus. Specifically, it answers the following questions: What is the demographic profile of the chorus members? How has the chorus shaped or reflected social issues; how has the chorus shaped or reflected political issues; how has the music evolved over time?; How was the chorus impacted by the HIV/AIDS epidemic? Historical information for this study was gathered through eight interviews of original and long-time choral members as well as the current artistic director. Interviews were conducted in San Francisco at the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus office, and additional data were derived from programs of previous choral concerts, two questionnaires (Internalized Homophobia Scale and Gay Chorus Questionnaire), and observations of choral rehearsals and concerts. As a follow-up to a previous study documenting the formation of the chorus in 1978-1982, this study historically documents the chorus's evolution from 1983 through 2003, emphasizing the chorus's impact on social and political issues, the musicality of the chorus, and the impact of HIV/AIDS on the chorus.

[Forbidden sexualities: madness and the male gender]. / Sexualidades interditadas: loucura e gênero masculino.

The article identifies and studies male sexuality and affectivity as forbidden and imprisoned in Brazilian asylums in the first decades of the Republic. By analyzing psychiatric records from that era, it explores the notion that sexual and affective behavior had little to do with the construction of male profiles deemed 'deviant' and/or 'pathological'. This reflection shifts the focus of analysis to the gender specificities that determine the various traits displayed in 'mental disturbances' attributed to certain sexual and affective behavior.