When participants responded to images of men with an erection, the closed electric circuit was broken and they received three-second electrical shocks at 10-second intervals. "I thought he was my savior," said Cameron, who enrolled with 13 other willing subjects, all Mormons who thought they might be gay, for a three-to-six-month course of therapy.Ī mercury-filled tube was placed around the base of the penis and the students were shown alternating slides of men and women in various stages of undress. The 1976 study at Brigham Young, "Effect of Visual Stimuli in Electric Aversion Therapy," was written by Max Ford McBride, then a graduate student in the psychology department. "I was very, very religious and the Mormon church was the center of my life," said Cameron, who had done missionary work in Guatemala and El Salvador. "As teens we were taught that homosexuality was second only to murder in the eyes of God," he said. "I kept trying to fight it, praying and fasting and abstaining and being the best person I could," said Cameron, now a 59-year-old playwright and head of the acting program at the University of Iowa.īut his undercurrent of feelings put him in direct conflict with the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints (LDS) and its principles. Twice a week for six months, he jolted himself with painful shocks to the penis to rid himself of his attraction to men. Pixland/Thinkstock(PROVO, Utah) - John Cameron said he was a naive and devout Mormon who felt "out of sync" with the world when he volunteered to be part of a study of "electric aversion therapy" in 1976 at Utah's Brigham Young University.