UI Prof’s New Play Examines Experiences with Controversial Reverse-Homosexuality Experiments

In the mid-’70s John Cameron was one of 14 gay men, most of them Mormon students, who were the subjects of a controversial “reparative therapy” experiment at Brigham Young University that used electro-shock aversion therapy in an attempt to alter their homosexual behavior. The research subjects signed documents absolving the university of culpability for any damage they suffered, including “damage to tissue or organs may occur,” and agreeing that they would be looking at “sensitive materials” possibly contrary to their values (i.e., pornography).

As Connell O’Donovan notes in “The Abominable and Detestable Crime Against Nature,” the long-term effects of the electric shock “therapy” these men were subjected to has been crippling. Two of the men committed suicide soon after completing this torturous study.

Moreover, Donovan notes that every survivor he interviewed has suffered life-long emotional, spiritual, and sometimes physical damage, including Cameron, who wrote to O’Donovan: “For 22 years now I have lived with the scars of the experience — unable to articulate a personal suffering and longing that have almost crippled me. …. I didn’t completely come out of the closet until I was 34, and only after much angry, pissed-off therapy. I spent a lot of money just so I could yell at my psychologist and break things in his office for an hour every week for two years. But it was a hell of a lot more fun than Ford McBride and the electrodes.”

Now, 30 years later, Cameron, a University of Iowa Department of Theatre Arts faculty member, takes a hard look at the experiment and its effects on his life in his new play, “14.” Written and directed by Cameron, the University Theatres Mainstage presented the world premiere of “14″ last weekend and will stage additional performances at 8 p.m. Feb. 6 to 9, and at 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 10.“The decision to write the play was a very long time coming,” Cameron said in a news release. “In the 25 years before I began work on the script, the idea never crossed my mind. To begin with, I was not overly proud of my decision to dothe therapy and told very few people about it. It wasn’t a subject that I wanted to share,” Cameron said. “Also, I had spent so much of my life trying to forget and minimize what I had done that I had somehow convinced myself that most people would find it more disgusting than interesting. I thought the subject matter just wasn’t worthy of attention.”

But then he stumbled on a Web site for the Mormon gay organization Affirmation and read an extensive history of homosexuality at BYU. “I was stunned by what I read,” Cameron said. “I learned that my experience belonged to a much larger community. I learned about the purge. I learned that my therapy was not an isolated event, but simply one of the more visible elements in a long history of abuse. It really shook up my very safe, insulated life.”

Cameron contacted O’Donovan, and as a result he was approached by a journalist, who requested an interview. At first, he was skeptical in being interviewed, but after finding out that Merrill Bateman, who became president in BYU in 1996, claimed he could find no evidence the experiment ever took place on campus, Cameron became infuriated. “So I agreed to it, but had no idea what I was getting myself into,” Cameron said in a statement.

“As we talked by e-mail and phone over a period of a few weeks, I was forced to relive the experience in detail for the first time in over two decades. The result was a three-year depression. I finally began to deal with what I had done to my life, and it was pretty hard to face. Writing the play was a way for me to work though my anger and isolation.”

Sometimes humorous, sometimes heartbreaking, this disturbing tale examines one man’s journey to find truth and, ultimately, the forgiveness that only he can give. Set in the year 2000, “14″ follows the events that unravel after a college professor, Ron Sorenson (see pic) , is contacted by a young lesbian journalist who has discovered he was one of the 14 subjects. Mirroring Cameron’s real-life experiences, Sorenson talks to the journalist and is forced to face the mistakes of the past, and his life begins to fall apart as he enters a world of dark and sometimes funny memories, violence, music — and the visceral horror of the experiment.

Asked whether these experiments left him with emotional or spiritual scars, Cameron told Hugo Salinas during an interview with Affirmation: “I’ve only recently begun to realize that I have completely shut down my sexual life for the last 25 years. I have never been able to maintain a long-term relationship with another man,” Cameron said. “Instead I have substituted a number of ill-advised and emotionally destructive relationships with women.

“Looking back I can honestly say that I was afraid of gay men. I felt true resentment and disgust for the gay community while simultaneously wishing I could somehow participate. The recognition of this and my efforts to change it have only begun within the last two or three years, and I am still struggling. I recently began to make some gay friends and make my first steps into this new world.”

Asked if he could find a place for forgiveness in the process of healing from abuse, Cameron told Salinas, “I’m in the middle of it now. I don’t think forgiveness is an event. It’s a process, and I don’t know if it ever ends,” Cameron said. “Sometimes I think it is too easily said. I don’t believe in complete closure.”