JOHANNESBURG - South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is expected to hear evidence today that the country's army tried in the apartheid era to "reprogramme" gay conscripts.
A submission to the commission by the Health and Human Rights Project accuses the chief psychiatrist at the Voortrekkerhoogte military hospital near Pretoria of carrying out aversion therapy on the men.
It says the psychiatrist, Dr Aubrey Levine, would show his "patients" pictures of naked men, encourage them to fantasise and then electrocute them. When they were screaming with pain he would stop the shock treatment, flash Playboy centrefolds under their eyes "and verbally describe the women portrayed in glowing and positive terms".
The submission says that the men subjected to the aversion therapy had given their permission, but, aged between 18 and 24, were vulnerable to pressure.