ABSTRACT
In the late 1940s, a 23-year-old African-American man in Connecticut received ECT for “homosexuality, transvestism, and psychosis.” 1 His doctor, Samuel Liebman, was pleased to have a patient with these combined presentations, because of the opportunity he saw to study their interaction. Homosexuality was widely regarded by physicians as an illness at this time, and ECT was sometimes used to treat it. This does not seem to have been a common use of ECT, which was mainly indicated for schizophrenia and affective disorders, although this is cold comfort to the gay and lesbian people who received ECT, and were traumatized by it. 2
Liebman described the events leading up to his admission to the hospital:
He . . . began running around in buses between several of the cities about Hartford ‘making a general spectacle of himself.’ He went into beauty parlors for permanent waves, walked the fl oors in department stores as though he belonged there, and when he appeared in court for the evasion of bus fare, he wore curlers in his hair and presented a generally feminine make-up.
