Tender Spaces

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00:00:00.000 –> 00:00:40.150 Alicia: I did a bunch of research into Chestnut Lodge. It was founded around the turn of the century. It was called the Chestnut Lodge Sanatorium, which is one of those creepy names for a mental hospital or psychiatric facility that everyone used. But it seems, by all accounts, to be like a place where people who have some amount of means would send their relatives for discreet treatment.

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00:00:40.170 –> 00:01:10.170 Alicia: It’s a lot of talk therapy. So it wasn’t some of the, like, more archaic, more violent kinds of treatment, shock therapy and chemical castration and those kinds of things. Although those were all used as treatments for homosexuality. They would use something called aversion therapy, which is where you’re basically treating you’re, you’re taught to be averse to a certain thing, so that if you exhibit a sort of response to a certain image, you’re punished in some capacity.

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00:01:10.230 –> 00:01:46.200 Alicia: It like shifts your attraction or appeal from one thing to another thing. But the in fact, like studies show that the, the, the effect of that kind of therapy is that it just causes trauma and PTSD responses to things that once were just sort of purely naturally pleasurable. So it doesn’t create a positive affiliation with the thing that it’s attempting to create a positive affiliation with, and only creates a traumatic and negative affiliation with the thing that is trying to be sort of steered away from.

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00:01:46.220 –> 00:01:53.120 Alicia: So there is only like basically a negative outcome.

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00:01:53.130 –> 00:02:20.060 Alicia: It was sort of couched in, in language of like, you know, hysteria and, you know, misguided ness and wasn’t like no one was out there saying, like, we’re treating homosexuality in an attempt to cure it and make it straight. So it’s hard in a way, to like, do the research because it’s like, what are you looking for? You’re looking for someone who’s vaguely talking about something, but never quite naming it.

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00:02:20.080 –> 00:02:34.130 Alicia: Be interesting to unpack what someone’s experiences were with that. She being someone who could always name herself as a lesbian, even when the people around who couldn’t quite do it, couldn’t bring themselves to do it.