[Intake Questionnaire for a Hospital Using LSD to “Cure” Homosexuality].

[British Columbia, Canada; San Francisco]: [1966]. 11½” x 10”. Three-ring binder, brown leather over board, holding a 2 pp. questionnaire and 318 pp. response (about 100,000 words), all typescript rectos only. Very good: album worn at corners and spine tips; last two leaves detached; intake pages lightly foxed; some faint scuffing to margins, not affecting legibility; a few handwritten amendments.

This is one man's astounding autobiographical assessment, aiming to receive “LSD Therapy” at Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster, Canada (part of the Vancouver metropolitan area). It includes the original two-page hospital questionnaire along with artfully written, thorough responses, revealing a man deeply ill at ease with his homosexuality and a lifelong sense of being an outcast.

The fascinating story of the hospital and its use of psychedelic psychiatry was recorded in the book The Acid Room: The Psychedelic Trials and Tribulations of Hollywood Hospital (Anvil Press, 2022). Named for the holly trees that masked its facade, it was the site of more than 6000 supervised acid trips between 1957 and 1968. Directors J. Ross MacLean and Al Hubbard aimed to cure alcoholism, anxiety, homosexuality and unhappy marriages, and claimed an 80% success rate. Hubbard (whose storied life included roles as radio pioneer, top secret spy and uranium entrepreneur) became known as the “Johnny Appleseed of LSD,” supposedly supplying Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary and psychiatrists who treated Cary Grant, Ethel Kennedy, Jack Nicholson and Stanley Kubrick.

This mammoth binder holds the hospital’s original 18-question intake form, with prompts such as “State reasons for taking L.S.D., what you hope to accomplish by it, and the problems confronting you now.” It asks would-be patients to “Discuss early development, temper tantrums, bedwetting, nightmares, illnesses and other unusual feelings”; their education, work, sex and marital history; interests, “ambition,” “self-description” and “How do you feel other people see you?”

The respondent was a 35-year-old man wanting “so much to feel whole in every way . . . a finding of my own true identity.” His main goals were to end his “almost overwhelming frustration in the creative arts” and “the problem of homosexuality which has been with me most of my life . . . how did it all happen? Why am I the way I am?” He also sought to “give love” and “to know how to receive it. Love and grasping are all mixed up to me.”

What follows is a greatly detailed, quite well-written autobiography. Born in late 1930 in Kentucky, he said that his mother was initially presented with the wrong baby in the hospital: a “mixup” that “has preoccupied me more than once.” As a child he “was generally sicker than a pup,” was “shamed” into toilet training, handed off between separated parents in Illinois and sent to military prep school in Ohio. “My early attitudes towards sex and ones I'm still saddled with to some degree I acquired from my mother . . . sex was dirty and disgusting and something not talked about.” Tales are recounted of “forced occupation” from an early age, selling fudge door to door, shoveling snow and caddying at a country club. Upon his return from Ohio, he noted that:

“Once freed from having to wear a military uniform as matter of regular attire one might have thought there'd be no lingering attachment . . . but I still had strong cravings for uniforms . . . I think the attention I got at school was not all too favorable. I did though wear my CAP uniform on trains during the war to visit my father; I event spent my leisure time between trains in the USO facilities talking to sailors and soldiers.”

After high school he worked for Sears in Chicago – mundane office tasks – and idolized the stock boys:

“I admired their strength and physique, their jaunty, devil-may-care attitude . . . There was a sense of security they enjoyed that I wanted to share in so much; they were so casual and dashing about it all, I guess at times cocky was the best word . . . It was a world I just couldn't get accepted into; a world I was too afraid to try to get into, but one I envied very much.”

He then served in the United States Air Force but hated it and was often ill. On a visit home on leave he went around flamboyantly dressed:

“I think in some degree I was just trying to say to everyone that I'd been freed, I'd been emancipated from the narrow mindedness, the drab, conservative, fearful way of living I thought them all to have; but, I wasn't really, if anything I was more frightened than all of them; they, I suppose had some security in their ways of life, their daily rituals; I had little, I think, in my own.”

He chose to fake psychosis to be released from service: “What else could I do? Was I to spill my guts, to tell them everything about being homosexual, about feeling so miserable most of the time, about my loneliness, my feelings of insecurity?” He was honorably discharged in 1951 and moved to San Francisco, where he worked odd jobs and was in and out of college. He described losing interest in his courses, conflicts with coworkers and general malaise. We read of his “attempts at femininity” and trying to fit in:

“I found during my motorcycle era that I was sought after, something which I enjoyed immensely . . . I was picked up and sexed by many guys who were looking for what I was portraying in my black leather jacket and motorcycle boots. They wanted to sleep with images, with symbols as much as I guess I did.”

The text covered his current job (the last date mentioned February 1966), which he seemed to be enjoying: accounting and bookkeeping for the wax museum on Fisherman's Wharf. He declared his hopes to be a writer or an artist, to live a peaceful and secluded life on the outskirts of a city. He explained his experience with (and disinterest in) drinking at gay bars, the clarity he received after trying “Morning Glory seeds” and his desire for a safe method to experiment further: “I don't have much confidence in the abilities of my friends . . . I rather think they fear my homosexuality or at least look down on it disparagingly.”

Through clues in the writing and a deep dive at ancestry.com, we learned that the hopeful patient was one Robert Locke Carr. We don't know if he received the treatment that he sought, but his obituary shared that he stayed as chief financial officer of the wax museum, was an actor with the Renaissance Faire, a member of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the Screen Actors Guild. He died in 1991.

An intricate, intimate glimpse into one man's struggle with his sexuality and self-esteem. Purdue University has a small group of Hollywood Hospital records, which holds nothing similar. OCLC shows a 2019 thesis that cites patient records, but no other original files. Very good. Item #6458

Price: $3,500.00