Imagine being seventeen. Your palms are sweating against the cold leather straps. A stranger adjusts electrodes on your bare skin while doctors hover nearby with clipboards. You’re told this will fix you. You’re told the pain has purpose. And then the current begins.

This isn’t a dystopian novel. It’s the lived reality for Jeremy Gavins, Pauline Collier, and at least 250 other LGBTQ individuals treated with Electric Shock Aversion Therapy (ESAT) within NHS hospitals between 1965 and 1973. Today’s revelation of their stories feels like prying open a rusted lock on a medicine cabinet we assumed only contained antidotes. Instead, we find evidence of state sanctioned harm dressed in lab coats.

I need to pause here and acknowledge something obvious. There’s no gentle segue into discussions about electrocuting teenagers into heterosexuality. The closest analogy I can muster involves obsolete kitchen appliances. Remember those avocado green toasters from the 70s that occasionally electrocuted people making breakfast? We rightly view them as dangerous relics. Yet somehow our medical establishment kept administering literal shock treatment for homosexuality until after David Bowie released Ziggy Stardust. Let that timeline sink in.

The mechanics were simple in their cruelty, as explained in declassified medical journals. Patients were strapped down, shown images of same gender attraction, and zapped with painful currents sometimes lasting an hour. Sessions repeated until the brain associated queer desire with physical agony. Researchers noted compliance rates with the enthusiasm of someone reviewing a successful microwave manual. One 1971 paper described participants, including a twelve year old child, as volunteers. But survivor testimonies reveal a darker truth.

Jeremy Gavins, now 72, recounts losing consciousness during treatment at seventeen. He awoke three days later in a hospital bed. Pauline Collier describes anticipating shocks with such dread that her hands still tremble sixty years later. She was nineteen, a working class girl conditioned to trust authority. I wish I could travel back in time and shield that trembling girl with today’s scientific consensus. The American Psychological Association has denounced conversion therapy since 1997. The NHS followed suit in 2021. But knowing better now doesn’t cauterize old wounds.

One detail haunts me beyond the physical violence. These treatments required institutional teamwork. Not rogue practitioners. Bright eyed nurses prepping electrodes. Admin staff filing consent forms. Cleaners mopping floors afterward. It makes me consider how ordinary people perpetuate extraordinary harm through bureaucratic compliance. We like imagining monsters as mustache twirling villains, not overworked hospital technicians following protocol. That’s far scarier. It means any of us could become accomplices to atrocity by refusing to question the clipboard.

And question we must. Because while the BBC’s investigation focuses on historical ESAT, conversion therapy remains legal today in most of the UK. Oh, not with cattle prods. Modern versions trade voltage for emotional volts ‘ pray the gay away’ camps, pseudoscientific counseling framing queerness as spiritual decay. Survivors describe similar psychological scars whether the weapon was electrodes or Bible verses.

Here’s where I must address the elephant in the examination room. If we condemn electric aversion therapy as barbaric, how can we tolerate any form of conversion practice? It’s like outlawing arsenic but allowing rat poison in cupcakes. Lord Chris Smith, Britain’s first openly gay MP, calls the findings evidence of state endorsed homophobia. He’s leading demands for governmental apology. But apologies require more than carefully worded press releases. They demand accountability through policy change. Specifically, passing England’s repeatedly delayed ban on conversion therapy.

Defenders will argue these 60s doctors were products of their era. That mitigation always surfaces when historical malpractice emerges. It’s worth noting that even then, ethical objections existed. Dr. Martin Cole publicly denounced conversion therapy in 1972, calling it violent quackery. His colleagues dismissed him as an activist. Meanwhile, mainstream medicine kept electrocuting queer teens for another year. Progress didn’t lack evidence. It lacked moral courage.

Witnessing survivors recount their trauma six decades later, I’m struck by what might’ve been. Pauline Collier flinches recalling waiting those thirty seconds between image and shock. Jeremy Gavins’ voice fractures describing the nurse who strapped him down. These are stolen lives. Not in the literal sense, though the suicide risk post conversion therapy is well documented. But stolen in how decades were eaten by shame and PTSD that proper healthcare should’ve prevented.

Medical harm lingers like radiation. It contaminates trust in future healers. How many queer elders still avoid therapy today because their first encounter involved electrodes? How many closeted teenagers fear coming out after hearing these stories? Rebuilding requires more than banning bad practices. It needs active cultural care through education and reparative justice.

Organisations like the Ozanne Foundation and Stonewall offer roadmaps here, pushing NHS engagement programs to rebuild trust. Imagine survivor led workshops in medical schools. Or queer competency training becoming as standard as CPR certification. When institutions hurt people, healing demands handing them the scalpel during reconstruction.

Still, some may ask why dredge up painful history? Because unexamined wounds fester. Because these survivors deserve more than footnotes in medical journals. And because today’s hesitation to ban conversion therapy outright echoes earlier indifference towards shocking people straight. We owe it to Jeremy, Pauline, and others to break this cycle.

In legal terms, there’s little recourse. Malpractice claims expire. The doctors involved are elderly or deceased. But ethical legacy isn’t dictated by statutes of limitations. Germany continues prosecuting Nazi war criminals in their nineties not for practical justice, but symbolic acknowledgment that some crimes defy calendar pages. While ESAT wasn’t genocide, it was systematized dehumanization bearing state approval.

As I write this, afternoon sun catches my wedding ring. My wife’s fingerprint is worn into the gold band. She brings me coffee while I wrestle with this conclusion. Two women building a life together would’ve made us targets for ESAT fifty years ago. That proximity to persecution chills me. My right to love exists through fragile threads of progress that could’ve easily been snipped by different circumstance. Like many queer people, I carry ancestor ghosts not related by blood but shared vulnerability to institutionalized hate.

So when survivors speak through trembling lips of treatments they endured before I was born, I don’t hear history. I hear prophecy narrowly avoided. And I understand demands for apology aren’t about the past. They’re about affirming that queer lives need no cure in the present. To every Jeremy and Pauline still breathing through that trauma, your courage shakes foundations stronger than any electric current ever could.

May your voices spark revolution.