don jackson - dachau for queers

Just north of Santa Barbara, California, travelers on U.S. Highway 101 pass what appears to be a beautiful school, its neatly chopped lawns, unobtrusive cyclone fence and majestic location giving it an air of tranquility.

It is, in fact, Atascadero State Hospital, a maximum-security facility designed to treat “sex offenders, sociopaths and cultural deviants.” Most of the “patients” are plain ordinary homosexuals who, having the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, were selected by the lottery called “morals law enforcement” to fall into the clutches of the doctors of Atascadero.

For years, disturbing rumors have circulated about what supposedly happens behind the walls of Atascadero—rumors of atrocious medical and surgical experiments similar to those of the Nazi concentration camps, of patients being turned into vegetables with experimental brain surgery, of torture and other gothic tales of horror.

Officials of the California State Department of Mental Hygiene and staff members at Atascadero have repeatedly denied the rumors, either in whole or in part.

Still the reports continue to come. They come from patients, former patients, staff members, mental health professionals, legal experts, even from doctors who have worked there. 

All of the patients at Atascadero were “committed” there under the Mentally Disordered Sex Offenders Act, a California law which provides that any person who a judge feels is likely to commit a sex crime can be incarcerated in Atascadero until he has been “cured.”

Under California law, all sex acts other than those between a married couple fucking (the man on top, the woman on bottom) are defined as sex crimes. In many rural counties, it is the practice to commit all suspected sex criminals to Atascadero. The MDSO law provides that such persons can be sent to Atascadero for ninety days’ observation. They need not be convicted of a crime, or even arrested; thus the state avoids the “inconveniences” of a trial and preparing evidence. Once committed, the person loses all legal rights and can be kept in the hospital for life, used for medical and surgical experiments, perhaps even murdered.

Dr. Paul E. Braumwell, research chief at Atascadero, frankly summarized the Department of Mental Hygiene’s view of the legality of the “treatments.” “These men have no rights. If we can learn something by using them [for medical and surgical experiments], then that is a small compensation for the trouble they have caused society.”

Dr. Grant H. Morris, professor of law at Wayne State University, visited Atascadero and witnessed the experiments being performed. Morris had a different view of the legality of the experiments. “The experiments were conducted in apparent violation of the Nuremberg Code, the Declaration of Helsinki and the AMA’s 1966 ethical guidelines for clinical investigation,” he said after his visit. The Nuremberg Code provides for an international tribunal to try government employees for “gross crimes against humanity.” Many German doctors were tried by the Nuremberg Tribunal after the Second World War for similar experiments on victims in concentration camps. The AMA’s ethical guidelines call for the expulsion of doctors who are “grossly unethical.”

The first positive evidence of dubious happenings at Atascadero came in the spring of 1970, when a monograph by Atascadero staff members was published. The monograph, by Dr. Martin J. Reimringer, chief psychiatrist, Dr. Sterling W. Morgan, medical chief of staff, and Dr. Paul F. Braumwell, research chief of staff, told of their experiments with a drug which produces acute anxiety death panic.

According to the monograph, the drug was tried out on at least ninety unwilling "patients"  at Atascadero and at least sixty seven more at the Vacaville Medical Facility (the state prison for gays). The drug Succinylcholine (anectine)  is forcibly injected into unwilling patients. It causes instant paralysis of all muscles, including those needed for breathing. The patient is taken “to the brink of death” and kept alive only through mechanical devices.

The purpose of the experiment, or “exploratory study,” as the doctors called it, was to see if the drug was “effective as an agent in behavior modification.” The criteria for selecting men for the experiment varied, the doctors said, but included “physical or verbal violence, deviant sexual behavior and lack of cooperation.” The establishment press erroneously reported that all of the victims were “incorrigibly violent inmates.” In fact, the doctors have never revealed what percentage of the victims fall into each of the four classifications, but the cases they cite indicate that many, if not most, were “verbally violent” or “sexual deviates.” Near the end of the monograph, the doctors admit that many of the victims were selected merely because they were “uncooperative.”

When the drug is injected, the victim loses all control of the body but retains consciousness. Respiration stops. The victim is convinced that he is going to die. Dr. Walter Nugent, chief psychiatrist at Vacaville, says, “The sensation is one of suffocation and drowning. The patient feels as if he had a heavy weight on his chest and can’t get any air into his lungs. The patient feels as if he is on the brink of death.” Then a technician commences to brainwash the patient, telling him how wicked he is. The doctors say that the victim might connect the behavior he is being scolded for with the feeling of dying, and so refrain from such behavior in the future.

When a copy of the monograph was leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chronicle ran a front-page exposé. “The doctors are in a tenuous legal and ethical position,” the Chronicle commented editorially. “Both the state law and the ethical rules of the American Medical Association prohibit experiments being performed on patients without their consent.” The Department of Mental Hygiene sent out a carefully worded press release to the publications which carried the Atascadero story, saying in part, “Be assured that the Department of Mental Hygiene shares your concern for the legal or illegal use of any drugs which is not in the interest of the patient. . . . The drug had been used by the research staff at Atascadero, but the use of succinylcholine has been ordered withdrawn by Dr. Lowry, director of the Department.”

When the accounts of succinylcholine’s use first appeared in San Francisco’s Gay Sunshine, the story brought a flood of letters   from readers, many of whom were former inmates at Atascadero. Many complained that the story concentrated too much on succinylcholine, noting that it failed to inform the readers of the other “treatments” in use at Atascadero. Several letters were from former inmates who had been subjected to electro-convulsive shock.

One particularly strong letter said that patients, including the writer, were often forcibly “choked unconscious, then dragged to the treatment room and tied down to the bed.” It is important to note, he went on, that “the treatment is not given for any medical reasons, but as a punishment for violation of ward rules.” The patient described the treatment as follows:

“They hit you with the first jolt, and you experience pain that you would never believe possible. At the same moment, you see what could be described as a flash of lightning. You cannot breathe, and they apply oxygen. During all this, you are in convulsions. This lasts only a few moments, but it seems like a lifetime. A few seconds after that, the pain is so severe that you pass out. About three months before I left the hospital, they made us (by threatening us with shock treatments) sign a paper saying that we have agreed to let them test drugs on us.”

Among the letters was one from members of the Atascadero staff, which said that “only one or two doctors [at Atascadero] still use electro-shock therapy.” The staff members seemed to imply that electro-convulsive shock is used only in a few instances; however, since it takes only five minutes to administer the treatment, “one or two doctors” would have time to turn all fourteen hundred inmates into vegetables — and electro-convulsive shock can do just that. It destroys brain tissue by sending a high-voltage electrical current through the brain. Often the victim can’t even remember his name, his age, or where he went to school. In fact, most doctors say that electro-convulsive shock is a barbaric savagery worthless as treatment, and it has been outlawed in most states.

Figures as to how extensively electro-convulsive shock is used are obscured by the veil of secrecy that shrouds Atascadero. But a hint came in January of 1972 when Dr. L. J. Pope, medical superintendent of Atascadero’s sister institution at Vacaville, told the San Francisco Examiner that the use of electro-convulsive shock has been greatly reduced, and was used on “only” 433 of Vacaville’s 1400 inmates in 1972.

The next hint of outrageous happenings at Atascadero came in June 1971. Gay activist Leo Dallas, a well-known militant in the gay movement in San Francisco, wrote a  

story about his experiences while incarcerated at Atascadero. (Dallas had been committed to Atascadero for kissing another male in public, which the California Penal Code defines as “lewd and lascivious conduct,” a felony punishable by one year to life.*) His eyewitness account of what goes on in Atascadero was published in “I Am,” a gay liberation newspaper published by Emmaus House in San Francisco.

In his story, Dallas tells how Atascadero doctors tried to “cure” him of homosexuality by means of electric shocks administered to the penis. He says that technicians showed him erotic material — “but the catch is they connect an electronic device to your genitals and when you get an erection, they give you a shock to make you lose it.”

Three weeks after the article was published, Dallas was arrested again for kissing a male in public — this time as he was participating in the Christopher Street West Parade in Hollywood — and was sent back to Atascadero.

Shortly after, Professor William B. Chambliss of the University of California at Santa Barbara took his class to visit Atascadero. Chambliss was so shocked by what he saw that he immediately wrote an article, published in the July/August issue of The Humanist. In his article, Chambliss describes what doctors call “The Errorless Extinction of Penile Responses Therapy.” The treatment consists of showing the patient pornographic slides. Each time the patient gets an erection, he is given an electric shock through a device attached to the penis; after a time the man will no longer have an erection when he sees pictures that previously caused him to be sexually stimulated.

Chambliss quotes Atascadero Research Chief of Staff Braumwell as saying that the treatment is a form of aversion therapy similar to classical Pavlovian conditioning. Other doctors say that shocks damage tissue, thus destroying the ability of the penis to erect.

Chambliss responded to all this by saying: “I don’t know what patients and staff are like when they are not in the institution, but judging from their behavior there, I would feel a great deal more secure about the world if the patients went home at night and the staff stayed locked up.”

Among the reader mail in response to the first Atascadero story was an unsigned letter postmarked “Atascadero.” “They don’t use succinylcholine any more,” it read, “because they have found something more horrible. It’s called prolixin.”

Officials at Atascadero deny that any type of aversion-therapy drug is used there. However, Dr. L. J. Pope, medical chief at Vacaville, told a press conference that prolixin was administered to 1,093 of the 1,400 inmates there during 1971. Dr. Philip Shapiro, a psychiatrist and anti-prolixin crusader, describes prolixin as “a personality-altering drug that acts on the hypothalamus.”

 He says that prolixin has caused irreversible brain damage resulting in Parkinson’s syndrome, a condition in which the sufferer has continual, uncontrollable twitching. One large dose of prolixin is sufficient to send the victim on a three-week bad trip of terrifying delusions, mental confusion and extreme pain.

Gay activist-writer John Lastala, a former Atascadero inmate, returned to Atascadero for a visit. One inmate reported that prolixin is “extensively used” there. Lastala, in a feature story in The Advocate, a Los Angeles-based gay newspaper, quotes the inmate as follows:

“It seems like it’s [prolixin] destroying your mind. You can’t concentrate. If you’re thinking three things at the same time, all those thoughts explode. If you’re thinking of spaghetti, for example, the spaghetti is blown up in your mind to the size of large tubes, snaking around every which way. Your thinking is slowed down.

“It seems like your breathing is stopped. Your eyeballs move funny — feel like you’re dying. The doctors tell you you’re dying, and without the antidote, you die. You can’t move anything. You’re like a vegetable. You sweat. They tell you if you’re ever caught having sex in here again, you won’t get the antidote and you’ll die.”

Another inmate says that prolixin caused him severe physical pain for three weeks. “I became very nervous,” he said; “I couldn’t sit still, lay down, or walk with any steadiness. I would try to write a letter but couldn’t keep my thoughts straight and my concentration was completely lost. Sleep was impossible and I was constantly tired and very confused. I lost all interest in life and I couldn’t hold a conversation.  . . This drug was given to me as a punishment, and not for any medical purpose.”

The geographical location of Atascadero is such that it is often obscured by heavy fog. From outside the cyclone fence one can get only fleeting glimpses of the buildings during momentary clearings in the fog. And so it is with the truth about Atascadero. All that is really known are a few bits and scraps of information — an indiscreet paper by overconfident staff doctors, a few slips of the tongue in the presence of reporters, the complaints of a handful of former inmates and staff members.

The full truth still lies hidden behind tight-lipped security. Yet the few shards have the unmistakable ring of truth; where there’s so much smoke, there’s got to be some fire.

The law permits the doctors at Atascadero to do as they wish with their charges. Their records are secret, hidden from the world. Who knows what new horrors the doctors are contemplating?

Late in 1971, Dr. Walter Freeman, often called “the father of lobotomy,” told a press conference that he had “severed the frontal lobes” of a number of homosexual inmates at Atascadero. Dr. Hunter Brown of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute volunteered his services free to the state—in exchange for their letting him use homosexual and habitual criminal inmates of California prisons and mental institutions for his experimental psychosurgical “cures” for homosexuality and criminal behavior. Brown admits he is already performing such surgery on sexual psychopaths but refuses to say where. But under California law, homosexuals are defined as “sexual psychopaths,” and Atascadero and Vacaville are the only two institutions for homosexuals in the western United States.

There have also been remarks by several state psychiatrists indicating their belief in the theory that homosexuality results from a defect or injury to the hypothalamic nucleus of the brain. In Germany, psychosurgery is in widespread use as a cure for homosexuality. The German operation consists of inserting an electronic probe into the sex-behavior center of the brain; then it is coagulated with an electrical charge. The operation “cures” the patient of all sex drive.

“There is no doubt,” says one doctor, “that homosexual tendencies can be removed by surgical procedure in the region of the sex-behavior center . . . 4 to 6 percent of the male population is infected with homosexuality. As a matter of public health policy, the treatment of such patients is at least as important as the treatment of those with organic neurological disease or neurosis.”

California’s anti-sex laws, among the harshest on earth, reflect the ludicrous, irrational, psychosexual views of the Victorian era. A few specific sex acts, such as sodomy, were singled out for a special statute, the penalty: life imprisonment. Most sex acts, preliminaries and everything even remotely connected with sex were covered by a catch-all law which made “Lewd and Lascivious Conduct” a felony also punishable by life imprisonment. Homosexual kissing, heterosexual petting, teat kissing and fondling, solitary masturbation and a score of other sex-related acts are punishable under this statute.

Many of the inmates at Atascadero are homosexuals. A few are rapists. But a large number are persons whose sexual behavior cannot be distinguished from that of society as a whole. The only difference is that they got caught—and were made scapegoats for the sins of all.

The San Francisco Chronicle exposed the ludicrous depths of hypocrisy to which the State of California has fallen. They told the story of “Carl,” a young man whose landlady peeked through the keyhole into Carl’s bathroom and observed him masturbating. 

She called the police. He was convicted of “lewd and lascivious conduct” and sentenced for one year to life. He was imprisoned for twelve years.