I don’t really care what people think about me, because what this type of therapy did was horrific, and people should be told,” he says.. Until now he has only shared his experience with close friends. “I kept it buried all that time because it was just too painful to think about. “We went back to his house where I got cleaned up, then we went to bed. I think it was my way of telling them where to go, it was my way of finally accepting what I am.

Far from curing me, the treatment confirmed more than anything else that I was gay.”His mother was angry that he had left with two days of the course still to run, perhaps feeling that the extra 48 hours might have been enough to cure her son Price never told her what he had been through. I told them I wanted to go home.”The staff tried to persuade him to stay, but he was adamant, and phoned to ask a friend to pick him up. I started worrying about what they were going to do next because one of them had said something like, ‘if this doesn’t work it’s the electric shocks next’ That was enough for me. “They wouldn’t let me go to the toilet, so you can imagine what it was like I didn’t sleep the whole time I was there I was in a terrible state, I couldn’t even think straight.

If I had been able to I might have got out earlier than I did.” By the end of the third day, he’d had enough “I thought. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong and I’m being treated like an animal, left to lie in my own shit and sick,’ so I decided I was going. That was where the whole thing fell down, because they didn’t.”Price was left in a locked room for 72 hours with no cleaning facilities. The idea was to link homoerotic stimulation with something unpleasant, because it was thought that this would help the patient revert to straightforward heterosexuality. “It’s possible that he was being injected with Antabuse, which reacts with alchohol and causes an unpleasant reaction – nausea.

“It was quite widespread in the Sixties because up until 1973 homosexuality was classified as a psychiatric problem.” He explains why Price was given alcohol prior to the injections. Every time the tape finished, it would be rewound and he would hear himself being quizzed about his sex life, while a nurse insisted he drank some more and looked at the magazines and further injections were given.Michael Forth, consultant psychiatrist at Liverpool University and medical director at West Cheshire NHS Trust, as Deva is now known, confirms that aversion therapy was carried out there. “They gave me another injection and the same thing happened, I was sick everywhere, but they just left me to it.” This was repeated throughout the day. It happened really quickly, and a few minutes later I threw up. They didn’t give me a bucket, so I was sick all over myself and all over the bed.” When he recovered he was ordered to continue looking at the magazines and carry on drinking An hour later they came back. “Three of them came back in and without saying a word gave me an injection. I was wondering how it was supposed to be curing me.”He didn’t have long to wait to find out.

“They told me to look at them, then they asked me what I liked to drink – which at the time was Guinness – and they brought me a bottle. They left me then, so I was sitting there looking at the magazines and drinking, while the tape recording of our conversation from the previous session played. The only furniture was a table on which stood another tape recorder and a stack of male erotica magazines. I think it was part of the treatment, trying to make me feel ashamed of what I was, and I feel really sorry for anyone who has to go through that.”After his “interrogation”, as he refers to it, Price was taken to a white walled room and told to get into bed. “They wanted to know about oral sex and anal sex – but it wasn’t clinical like you’d expect from a doctor. It was in really gross terms, making it sound disgusting, something to be ashamed of.