The researchers found that Britain's publicly funded National Health Service used electric shock treatment, hallucinogenic drugs and other brainwashing techniques in its "treatment" of gays.

Dr. Glenn Smith, a social scientist based at the Royal Free and University College Medical School in London, interviewed 26 gays who underwent these techniques -- either through coercion or in response to the social pressures of the day -- and 20 psychiatrists and psychologists who carried them out.

He said: "Nobody has been cured, which is only to be expected. The main recruiting areas have been Manchester, Birmingham, London and Northern Ireland."

Smith said, "At the time, homosexual practices were illegal and gays risked ostracization, imprisonment, or blackmail.

He said that for many gays at the time there were few choices. "On the one side you had the entrapment -- either you got the treatment or you ended up going to prison. On the other, there was family and social pressure."

Smith said that in some cases electric shock treatment was used, in association with a picture of a semi-nude male on an overhead projector. It followed the Pavlov theory, with a picture of a semi-naked woman as the reward.

Another form of aversion therapy was the use of a nausea-inducing drug, again taken while watching a picture of a half-naked male.

Smith said he interviewed one lesbian who was not treated but declared schizophrenic by her doctor and held in a mental hospital.

Smith said Alan Turing, the noted mathematician and ace code-buster during World War II, was among the prominent gays who cracked under the strain. After the war, he was stalked by the security services -- fearful that he might fall prey to blackmail -- and coerced into undergoing estrogen treatment before poisoning himself with a cyanide-laced apple.

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