How Estrogen Was Perniciously Used for ‘Gay Conversion’ In the Past
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A New Zealand gay man reveals how reading about the terrible conversion therapy that mathematician and World War 2 codebreaker Alan Turing endured led to the realization of what he himself experienced.
Colin Fenton saw an article in The Listener which described Turing’s story resonated. In 1952, Turing was prosecuted for “gross indecency,” and had to accept a sentence of chemical castration as an alternative to prison. Within two years, Turing was dead; he had eaten a cyanide-laced apple.
Photo above: Alan Turing
Fenton said he had undergone the same misguided ‘gay conversion’ treatment, suffered horrendous side effects from those drugs, and been driven to suicide – only in his case, a remarkable moment of luck saved his life. Now, aged 88, he’s ready to tell the story he’s kept hidden all those years.
In 1959 Fenton went to a psychiatrist called Leon Shenken, who started him on a course of electroshock therapy, or ECT, a common treatment for mental health issues at the time. It worked, briefly.
Then he went to another psychiatrist, Laurie Kalman Gluckman. He thinks Gluckman also administered ECT, but also gave him a series of injections. And then, when Colin planned to travel to England to stay with Halls’ parents, he says Gluckman gave him pills. Colin says Gluckman never explained what they were. “I can’t remember him giving any counselling … he just implied it would lift the depression.”
Colin says his memory is very clear: the bottle was labelled stilboestrol. In a statement he wrote for the Royal Commission into Abuse in State Care, Colin reflects: “I was completely naive. I just wanted to feel better… I think they were trying to blow the gay out of my brain.”
Stilboestrol is a nonsteroidal estrogen medication, which is presently rarely used today because of its many deadly side effects.
“Gluckman said it would make me feel better,” wrote Colin. “But it didn’t.” Instead, he had no sexual drive, felt isolated, lonely, and embarrassed and all but quit a promising musical career as a bass-baritone (he’d sung with several touring groups, and with Kiri Te Kanawa). It also cost him his relationship with Halls. They split, and Halls met Peter Hudson, forming a lifelong partnership as the comedy chefs Hudson and Halls.
“He would have known about the Turing case,” says Colin. “He knew.”
Gluckman would later be somewhat discredited; in 1994, Judge Peter Trapski delivered a report which said ACC had used Gluckman as a consultant “hitman” to deliberately decline claims after the Medical Council had found him guilty on four counts of professional misconduct.
Laurie Gluckman died in 1999. His son, Sir Peter Gluckman, the former government chief science advisor, was 10 at the time of Colin’s treatment, and understandably, didn’t know his father had prescribed stilboestrol. He knew his father used ECT during the 1950s and into the mid-1960s, “as was standard for depression, but I know nothing more than that … I have never heard he was involved in such work: it surprises me”.
Fenton says one reason for speaking up now is his feeling that Gluckman got away with it. “It plays heavily on my mind that he’s never been made culpable.”
Photo: David Halls, left, and Colin Fenton, at Princes Wharf, Auckland, seeing off friends on a ship to London, c1960-62.
