Lee Clayton was a shy and innocent teenager, “cotton woolled” in parental love and protection while growing up in Wahroonga, on Sydney’s north shore. She didn’t know what a lesbian was, having never even heard the word – but she knew she had a crush on her English teacher, a kind woman who taught her for four years, and who would patiently listen to her speak about her personal troubles.
Most days, Clayton would pick this teacher a rosebud and leave it for her on her desk. “I had no idea that loving her was a bad thing,” she recalls, with a rueful laugh.
Clayton, now 71, believes her late mother “must have known I had lesbian tendencies”, because Clayton would come home and declare that she “really loved” her teacher, who was also a member of her scripture union. Her mother would just roll her eyes.
“My mother had been in the air force, and she probably knew of such women – she didn’t want me to be one of them,” Clayton says.
Concealing her same-sex attraction contributed to Clayton having a nervous breakdown when she was just 19, then becoming distressed again at 21. It was because of this, while she was training to become a nurse, that she was referred to a private hospital in Sydney for treatment.
Clayton was a virgin, and had yet to act on her same-sex attraction at all. “My mum said to one of the nursing sisters at the hospital that I was ‘interested in girls’, and the sister replied, ‘Oh, we’ll sort her out’,” she recalls.
Clayton’s story has inspired a semi-fictional storyline in a new play titled CAMP, written by Elias Jamieson Brown, which will premiere during Sydney WorldPride. CAMP, or the Campaign Against Moral Persecution, was a queer rights group that rallied against so-called “cures” for homosexuality and fought to decriminalise homosexual acts, then illegal between men. CAMP provided safety in numbers, fighting persecution through protests and providing support through their regular newspaper CAMP Ink, a phone counselling service and a drop-in centre at Glebe.
Clayton was admitted to the hospital in the late 1960s, a few years before Australia’s golden age of LGBTQ activism. The hospital would become notorious for the controversial “deep sleep” therapy for psychiatric illnesses, a treatment regime developed by the psychiatrist Dr Harry Bailey.
People were admitted for all sorts of reasons, but patients at the hospital were sometimes the subject of controversial brain surgery. Patients could be sent to another hospital for a cingulo-tractotomy, a “psychosurgery” Bailey claimed in a paper was a “potentially life-saving therapeutic measure” for patients suffering from severe chronic depressive illness. In 1973, according to an article in CAMP Ink, Bailey himself estimated that 15% of his patients who underwent the procedure, which he also described as a “treatment for sexual immaturity”, were homosexual.
“One woman I befriended, a nun, came back from having this operation and she wasn’t herself anymore,” Clayton says. “Awful.”
Clayton believes she was probably at the hospital for around three weeks – she cannot recall exactly how long – but she says the experience left her with lifelong physical and psychological damage. She says that, about three times a week, the doctors would come to treat patients in the middle of the night. Clayton vividly recalls Bailey as a “strange character”, who was “very flamboyant” and “blustery” and always wore a monocle and “very loud” Hawaiian shirts.
Clayton says she was kept in a treatment room with two other patients, a sheet over each of them, and at times her wrists and ankles were shackled to the bed. Patients were typically given sedative pills between deep sleep intravenous barbiturate treatments, Clayton says, but she would often only pretend to take her pills, secretly spitting them into a pot plant or the bottom of a cigarette packet.
She describes being given electro-convulsive therapy, the sudden jolts from which she believes have wrecked her back for life. She says she also suffered urinary tract infections for years after lying on a constantly wet mattress.
One time after pretending to take her pills, Clayton hid behind a curtain. She says it was then that she overheard that she had been nominated by staff for brain surgery. “I heard them saying ‘Lee Clayton, we’re going to send her off to have a cingulo’. I thought, ‘No you’re not’. I had to get out of there.”
That same night, Clayton escaped out the front door, which staff had kept unlocked for smoking breaks. She ran to a phone booth and rang a trusted doctor, who she says admitted her to a general hospital for safety.Robyn Kennedy, an associate producer on the play and co-author of the 2022 book CAMP, points out that when Clayton was hospitalised, homosexuality was still considered a mental disorder.
“People decided they could cure homosexuality,” she says. “There was no real objection from the medical profession … we had to wait until homosexuality was taken off [the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders, in 1973].”
Bailey killed himself in 1985. He appears as a character in Jamieson Brown’s play, which includes the moment queer activists tipped a bucket of blood and sheep’s brains into the foyer of his Sydney practice.
Kennedy rejected her own education by the Catholic Sisters of Charity at school that “particular friendships” – the nuns’ codeword for lesbianism – were “unhealthy”. At CAMP, which Kennedy joined in 1975, eventually becoming the New South Wales secretary, she found “like-minded people whom I loved and who loved me”.
Clayton also joined CAMP around the same time as Kennedy, a year or two after her traumatic time in the hospital. It was at CAMP that she finally found support for who she was. Today, she is a mother of one and grandmother of two, and has had good romantic relationships in her life (she is currently single). She knows that holding on to anger about what happened to her would only lead to bitterness.
“I’m very grateful for all the good things in my life and also having gone through this experience,” she says. “It’s helped me to be more open, compassionate and understanding of people.”
CAMP is on at the Reginald Theatre, Seymour Centre until 4 March
In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978. In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, Mental Health America is available on 800-273-8255
