#4: The Initiation of Heterosexual Behavior in a Homosexual Male (Comments)

"Very well-researched and delivered in an engaging, breezy, wink-wink tone similar to that of Mark Leyner and Billy Goldberg's Why Do Men Have Nipples?, this will likely be enjoyed equally by science buffs and casual aficionados of the curious. One of the finest science/history bathroom books of all time."
-Kirkus Reviews

#4: The Initiation of Heterosexual Behavior in a Homosexual Male

In 1954 James Olds and Peter Milner of McGill University discovered that the septal region is the feel-good center of the brain. Electrical stimulation of it produces sensations of intense pleasure and sexual arousal. They demonstrated their discovery by inserting wires into a rat's brain and then showing that when the rat figured out it could self-stimulate itself by pressing a lever, it would maniacally bang on that lever up to two-thousand times an hour. (The image at the very top of this page, third from the right, shows one of Olds and Milner's rats banging on its lever.)

In 1970, Robert Heath of Tulane University dreamed up a far more novel application of Olds and Milner's discovery. Heath decided to test whether repeated stimulation of the septal region could transform a homosexual man into a heterosexual.

Heath referred to his homosexual subject as patient B-19. He inserted Teflon-insulated electrodes into the septal region of B-19's brain and then gave B-19 carefully controlled amounts of stimulation in experimental sessions. Soon the young man was reporting increased stirrings of sexual motivation. Heath then rigged up a device to allow B-19 to self-stimulate himself. It was like letting a chocoholic loose in a candy shop. B-19 quickly became obsessed with the pleasure button. In one three-hour session he pressed it 1500 times until, as Heath noted, "he was experiencing an almost overwhelming euphoria and elation and had to be disconnected."

By this stage of the experiment B-19's libido was so jacked up that Heath decided to proceed with the final stage in which B-19 would be introduced to a sexually-willing female partner. With permission from the state attorney general, Heath arranged for a twenty-one-year-old female prostitute to visit the lab, and he placed her in a room with B-19. For an hour B-19 did nothing, but then the prostitute took the initiative and a successful sexual encounter between the two occurred. Heath considered this a positive result.

Little is known of B-19's later fate. Heath reported that the young man drifted back into a life of homosexual prostitution, but that he also had an affair with a married woman. Heath optimistically decided that this showed the treatment was at least partially successful. However, Heath never did try to convert any more homosexuals.

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Total Comments: 19

Comments
Listed in chronological order. Newest comments at the end.

Actually, B-19 went on to have a successful career in politics until his arrest in an airport bathroom. 😉
Posted by Brian on Thu Aug 30, 2007 at 08:33 AM

:lol: ROFLMAO Where is this Doc now? My septal region needs stimulating. I'd be like that rat, banging my "lever" thousands of times an hour! (I wonder, will this work if I strip the cord of a lamp and stick it in my head?)
Posted by starbirdcanada on Thu Aug 30, 2007 at 10:54 PM

so. . . where can I buy some of those teflon-insulated electrodes? (just curious, I mean. . . I'm not really gonna DO anything with them or anything, OK?)
Posted by illlich on Thu Sep 13, 2007 at 01:36 PM

I wish they continued it. I'd like to be converted.
Posted by Mike on Thu Sep 13, 2007 at 02:55 PM

Reminds me of Woody Allen's orgasmatron.
Posted by daniel luke on Thu Sep 13, 2007 at 03:07 PM

I guess no one would like to really have those electrodes. I read that the rats died in a few hours after they received green card to pull the lever. They found the limits of the body for sex.
Posted by nga on Thu Sep 13, 2007 at 05:31 PM

They should have dine the exeriment the other way around, to see if a straight man would get so aroused that he would stick it in another guy's pooper. Or even bang a really fat chick. Well never mind, alcohol would accomplish that.
Posted by yes on Sat Sep 29, 2007 at 04:02 AM

This would not likely make me one iota less gay. I may in fact rape the researcher. On the other hand it sounds like a fun weekend.
Posted by Barry on Mon Oct 29, 2007 at 01:35 PM

The rat died of starvation. He spent so much time pushing that lever that he didnt bother to eat or drink and starved to death.
Posted by Scott on Wed Oct 31, 2007 at 10:11 PM

What I want to know is, why isn't there a huge market, black or otherwise, for these implantations?

You'd think all those tattoo and piercing salons would be doing it on the side.
Posted by Big Gary on Thu Nov 29, 2007 at 04:08 PM

wait, so this was a hoax?
Posted by Bill on Sun Nov 29, 2009 at 09:50 PM

So, basically, he just pumped up the person's sex drive so high they couldn't control who they'd sleep with. That's not 'curing' them, that's just fucked up.
Posted by Mil on Thu Mar 04, 2010 at 03:02 AM

It will be interesting to see if in the future helmets or some devices can be made to manipulate electric impulses in the brain to increase the sexual drive or produce sexual stimulation. There can even be robot lovers that appear human-like. Perhaps this would end prostitution once and for all!
Posted by amsterdam red light district on Thu Mar 18, 2010 at 12:20 AM

this showed the treatment was at least partially successful. However, Heath never did try to convert any more homosexuals.
Posted by life coaching on Mon Mar 29, 2010 at 01:41 AM

Crazy stuff, but its good thing Heath didn't take his experiments much further. Imagine if he combined this experiment with Milgram and Pavlov's research. I'll leave it to people's imaginations to figure out what I'm getting at.
Posted by anonymous coward on Sat Nov 13, 2010 at 06:15 PM

I'm also curious why there is no black market for this stuff. Just imagine how much money people would pay for this incredible pleasure.
Posted by Som on Sun Nov 21, 2010 at 10:13 AM

all this shows is that if you get a man horny enough, he will fuck anything. This says nothing about homosexuality.
Posted by Gretchen on Sat Jan 15, 2011 at 09:28 AM