We discovered some mental health professionals not only sought to ‘cure’ lesbians but also imposed naive assumptions that women were attracted to women in the same way as they assumed straight men were. After the treatment, she had subsequently discovered feminism, came out, and was happily living with her long-term female partner. Now in her 70s, she was surprised to learn that her story had been written up without her permission by the psychologists as a ‘successful’ case of treatment. Finding the needle in the haystackīy chance, I was chatting with an friend and colleague about the research and discovered that she knew a woman who’d experienced aversion therapy. When she put us in touch, it turned out that this was one of the women who had received the ‘therapy’ at North Manchester. We were intrigued by these cases, but were unable to access NMGH records, so had no way of finding out what happened to the women involved, or how many other women went through this procedure. Some women had definitely been subjected to this treatment, as two examples of young women were anonymously recorded in a research paper as ‘successfully’ treated. The hospital had been given an anonymous donation on the condition that the money was used to treat homosexuality. We knew from the psychiatric literature that a form of aversion therapy was administered by psychologists at the North Manchester General Hospital (NMGH) in the mid-1960s. While there has been a growth in ‘hidden from history’-type research (often called archival activism), there is still little knowledge about what happened to LGBTQI people, especially women, who ended up in the psychiatric system. However, there is much less known about how they overlap. There is substantial and growing interest in LGBT history and, to a much lesser extent, psychiatric survivor history. But, we asked, what happened to women? Although female homosexuality wasn’t criminalised, unlike male homosexuality, it was still classified as a mental disorder (‘sexual deviation’) that could be medically treated. For gay men, aversion therapy involved being given emetic drugs and receiving electric shocks while they viewed naked images of men. Sarah Carr and I first met several years ago at a mental health conference when she presented a powerful account of her experiences of being a gay woman and a psychiatric survivor.Īfterwards, we spoke about a colleague’s research into gay men’s experiences of receiving aversion therapy to ‘treat’ their sexuality.