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Further events and reading

‘Conversion Therapy’ and the University of Birmingham c.1966-1983

To communicate the findings of the 2022 "Conversion Therapy' and the University of Birmingham, c.1966-1983' investigation, and the harm caused by so-called ‘conversion therapy’, the University has held events, its staff have developed a network of experts, and this website was created.

You can view the public round table held the day the report was released, and read about the network below.

A Town Hall Meeting was held at the University for staff and students on 21 June 2022. Key figures, including Professor Robin Mason, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (International), and Joanne Duberley, Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion), as well as those representing the Steering Group spoke at the event and answered questions. Professor Sarah Beck described how the research project has helped the current members of the School of Psychology to develop an understanding of the historical research and to plan actions for the future. Dr Mo Moulton presented an overview of the process and content of the report.

Whilst the University and its staff will continue to explore effective ways of disseminating the findings, including embedding in teaching, these webpages offer readers resources for the history of ‘conversion therapy’, including the further reading found below.

‘Twentieth-Century Psy-Disciplines and LGBTQIA+ Communities’ Network

Around the world, governments are reflecting on the use of so-called ‘conversion therapy’ on LGBTQIA+ communities. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the context, diversity and realities of these culturally-contingent practices and the ideologies underpinning them. This Network, ‘Twentieth-Century Psy-Disciplines and LGBTQIA+ Communities’, has emerged from a University of Birmingham project offering such insights, and already embraces key scholars researching historical praxis, all of which will inform wider discussions.

The Network is supported thanks to a grant from Wellcome/Society for the Social History of Medicine. Led by Sarah Marks (Birkbeck, University of London), our programme of three events focuses on ‘Histories and Contexts of ‘Conversion Therapies’’. The first official activity of the Network was the Birmingham roundtable event in June 2022. The second will be held at Birkbeck in 2023, and the third at Edinburgh.

Suggested Further Reading

General LGBTQ+ Histories

  • H. G. Cocks and Matt Houlbrook (eds), Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
  • Richard Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment: Attitudes to Sex and Sexuality in Britain since the Renaissance (London: Collins, 1990).
  • Lesley A. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880 (Houndmills: MacMillan, 2000).
  • Brian Lewis, Wolfenden’s Witnesses: Homosexuality in Postwar Britain (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016).
  • Jeffrey Weeks, ‘Discourse, Desire and Sexual Deviance: Some Problems in a History of Homosexuality’ (1981), republished in Richard Parker and Peter Aggleton (eds), Culture, Society and Sexuality: A Reader. Second Edition (London: Routledge, 2007; 1999).
  • Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual politics in Britain, from the nineteenth century to the present. Third edition (London: Quartet Books, 2016).

History of the Psy-Disciplines and the LGBTQ+ Community

  • Ivan Crozier, ‘Nineteenth-Century British Psychiatric Writing about Homosexuality before Havelock Ellis: The Missing Story’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 63 (1), 2008, 65–102.
  • Roger Davidson, ‘Psychiatry and homosexuality in mid-twentieth-century Edinburgh: the view from Jordanburn Nerve Hospital’, History of Psychiatry, 20 (4), 2009, 403-424.
  • Jack Drescher and Joseph P. Merlino (eds), American Psychiatry and Homosexuality: An Oral History (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2007).
  • Donna J. Drucker, The Machines of Sex Research: Technology and the Politics of Identity, 1945-1985 (London: Springer, 2014).
  • Katherine Anne Hubbard and David Andrew Griffiths, ‘Sexual Offence, Diagnosis, and Activism: A British History of LGBTIQ Psychology’, American Psychologist, 8 (74), 2019, 940-953.
  • Katherine Hubbard, Queer Ink: A Blotted History Towards Liberation (London: Routledge, 2020).
  • Rebecca Jennings, ‘“The most uninhibited party they’d ever been to”: The Postwar Encounter between Psychiatry and the British Lesbian, 1945–1971’, Journal of British Studies, 47(4), 2008, 883-904.
  • Simon LeVay, Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
  • Abram J. Lewis, ‘”We Are Certain of Our Own Insanity”: Antipsychiatry and the Gay Liberation Movement, 1968-1980’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 25(1), 2016, 83-113

Aversion Therapy

  • Sarah Carr and Helen Spandler, ‘Hidden from history? A brief modern history of the psychiatric “treatment” of lesbian and bisexual women in England’, The Lancet Psychiatry, 6 (4), 2019, 289-290.
  • Kate Davison, ‘Cold War Pavlov: Homosexual aversion therapy in the 1960s’, History of the Human Sciences, 34 (1), 2021, 89-119.
  • Tommy Dickinson, ‘Curing Queers’: Mental nurses and their patients, 1935-1974 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).
  • Michael King, Glenn Smith and Annie Bartlett, ‘Treatments of homosexuality in Britain since the 1950s—an oral history: the experience of professionals’, British Medical Journal, Online First, 29 January 2004, doi:10.1136/bmj.37984.496725.EE.
  • Glenn Smith, Annie Bartlett and Michael King, ‘Treatments of homosexuality in Britain since the 1950s—an oral history: the experience of patients’, British Medical Journal, Online First, 29 January 2004, doi:10.1136/bmj.37984.442419.EE.
  • Helen Spandler and Sarah Carr, ‘Lesbian and bisexual women’s experiences of aversion therapy in England’, History of Human Sciences (Online First), 2022, 1-19.
  • Helen Spandler and Sarah Carr, ‘The shocking ‘treatment’ to make lesbians straight’, Wellcome Collection Stories, 22 January 2020.

National UK LGBTQ+ Archives