by LEE CONELL
PAINTING/Matt Mullican, Untitled (brain), 2011.
In the early seventies, I began sleeping with a married doctor who wanted to cure homosexuality. I was twenty-one. In our hotel room, he showed me black-and-white photographs of patients’ brains like they were Kodak color snapshots of his own children at play: cooing over the cerebellum’s left lobe, marveling over the funniest reaction some area had had to electrical stimulation. I’m exaggerating a little, but not much. He pointed out, very tenderly, the deep brain and surface electrodes, his finger pads leaving sheeny traces of grease on the photograph.
…
The doctor’s favorite patient, the one he always told me about, was a 21-year-old homosexual male who wanted to be a woman. “You’re the same age as him!” the doctor exclaimed to me sometimes. Of course the patient and I (the doctor said) were very different. The patient—the doctor told me we’d call him Patient C—suffered from depression, drug and alcohol abuse, and suicidal rumination. Under the doctor’s direction, stainless-steel electrodes were implanted into a number of subcortical sites in the patient’s head. Soon, the doctor told me, his team of researchers would begin to passively stimulate these implanted sites. They were going to determine which region of the brain was associated with pleasure.
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