by Donald West
In the days of gay liberation, activists were mostly social rebels, deriding nuclear families and capitalist oppression, promoting free love, and delighting to shock in attire and manners. Today the talk is of lasting partnerships, serious commitment and integration into the wider community. In reality, a variety of life-styles – sexual fidelity, open partnerships, closed but serial partnerships, or unfettered sexual freedom – prevail among both heterosexuals and homosexuals. Toleration of individual choice, but always with an eye to avoiding harm to others, would seem the ideal.
In the Fifties, when law enforcement activity brought about numerous scandals in high places and the government was moved to set up the Wolfenden inquiry, the subject of homosexuality, hitherto taboo, suddenly became a topic of debate. This enabled me to publish my book advocating tolerance, but it had to be written under the hypocritical cloak of detached psychological analysis and in language suggesting the author was one of ‘us’ talking about ‘them’. It was beyond my wildest dreams that in old age I should be able to write freely about my own guilty sex life. Luckily, with no close surviving relatives who might be embarrassed, and former work colleagues of the now distant past being probably no more than faintly amused should they read this, I should not be doing anyone harm. Existing friends are all too familiar with my private life.
Unfortunately, hatred of homosexuals and lesbians is far from dead. Gay has become a term of abuse or general disapproval in youthful slang, and gay-related crimes of violence are alarmingly common. The Anglican Church is falling apart in the face of opposition to human rights for gays. Gay tourism has become dangerous in many countries. In places such as Iran, Uganda and Iraq gays are in fear for their lives. To the embarrassment of the British government, too many gay refugees are seeking asylum here, mostly unsuccessfully. In the United States, ostentatious gay parades and gay venues vie with horrendous vilification by the religious right. In Russia, where liberal law reform was not so long ago the order of the day, repression has re-emerged. Global acceptance of homosexual living is nowhere in sight.
In contemporary Britain all is not rosy. The gay image is still unfairly confused with paedophilia. Heterosexual politicians like to parade their partners at public occasions; their few openly gay colleagues are more reserved. In the business world, there is often a similar contrast between gay and heterosexual partners, although some large companies are keen to advertise their non-discriminatory employment and promotion policies. The social life of the majority is geared to couples and families with children. Many gays still prefer to spend their leisure time with friends who are also gay, rather than trying to integrate. The politically correct stance of full acceptance is too often a matter of fragile politeness, apt to break down when a son or daughter displays a minority orientation. Provincial attitudes are different from those in London, where gays still flock to follow a life-style hidden from their family of origin.
All old people dread being taken from home and placed in some institutional refuge for the incapable. Older gays have additional concerns about gay-hating fellow patients or negative discrimination by staff. The United States has private nursing homes and sheltered accommodation run as private enterprises specifically for gays and lesbians. A former consultant to a large American company, who was aiming to set up similar establishments in England, contacted me to obtain an opinion on the likely demand among gays. We had already had some discussions among the group of elderly gay men to which I belong. Setting aside the deterrent factor of private fees, and unwillingness to start thinking about becoming physically dependent or bed-bound, opinion was divided. One man thought the bitchiness and shallowness of a certain type of gay so off-putting he would not like to be closeted among them. Others, recognising that they enjoyed socialising in the protective environment of gay groups, welcomed the idea. I agreed with those who preferred a gay-friendly environment to a gay ghetto, but thought it an advantage to have at least some gay companions.
The afflictions, restrictions and reduced mobility of old age affect people of all sexual orientations. Up till now I have been fortunate, following triple coronary bypass at seventy, I have continued a normal but increasingly sedentary life, with minimal manual exertion. But having arrived at the ‘departure lounge’ stage, one must resign oneself to impending extinction, either mercifully swift or by lingering disintegration. It was not until well into my eighties that pain and restriction of movement in both arthritic hips became so bad that the prospect of life in a wheel-chair loomed. Total hip joint replacements with metal prostheses were offered and carried out in successive operations at age eighty-six. After each six day stay in hospital, being delivered home on crutches and unable even to dress unaided, meant that my partner had to undertake nursing, shopping, and cooking duties. This he did unhesitatingly, and even after I was able to walk again without a stick he went on doing everything for me as if I were still helpless. Although subsequently able to get around without pain, it has become impossible to walk briskly or to cover much distance without becoming breathless. Moreover, failing memory has by now reached embarrassing proportions, being on occasion unable to recall the name of some close friend or the events of a day or so go. Considering my anxious temperament, these signs of deterioration might have been expected to cause panic, but instead the inevitability of it all seems to promote resignation, and attention to my will to ensure my partner can have the flat after my death. Remaining are the common fears of dementia, dependence on 24 hour nursing and loss of life savings to pay for it.
Up till now euthanasia has been an issue of interesting but detached intellectual debate, but in reality one cannot know how one will react when the time comes. I have to admit that ingrained dread of death might prevent anticipatory suicide and likely block voluntary euthanasia. At this time of writing, my longest standing friend John – the one-time flat mate who stayed friendly with Pietro until he died and helped me cope afterwards – is dying of multiple cancers. Watching his helplessness and suffering, despite receiving well-meaning care, I wish sufficient morphine could be given to terminate his unnecessary agony. These are unspoken thoughts, but perhaps not untypical at my age.
Reflections on the Paranormal
In the prevailing atmosphere of scientific scepticism, suspicion of fraud hangs over any experimenter who reports positive ESP or PK results. The leading British exponent of ESP guessing tests in the Forties and Fifties, the mathematician S.G.Soal, using specially gifted subjects, reported more positive results than any other British researcher. He was always somewhat suspect, even among some fellow parapsychologists. As mentioned before, I witnessed a session with his first successful subject, Basil Shackleton. Shortly after Soal’s death, a statistician, Betty Markwick, produced strong evidence that he had cheated in his Shackleton tests. This was the culmination of years of publicised suspicion. There had been a belated admission that a witness at one Shackleton session had seen Soal altering a figure on a record sheet. When asked a long time later to let colleagues see his record sheets, he announced he had long since accidentally left all of them on a train.
Handwritten copies, made at the conclusion of each session, were still available. Markwick’s discovery, using these copies, made use of the fact that, within the supposedly random series of numbers representing the five different targets in the Shackleton tests, some short sequences of target digits were repeated. This should not have happened if the numbers had been drawn systematically from tables of logarithms in the exact manner Soal described. This was not a critical flaw, since it could not account for the successful guessing. However, among these repeated sequences there was an occasional discrepancy when a particular digit was not the same. These discrepancies generally coincided with correct guesses, a strong indication that at some stage digits had been changed to register fake hits. Unfortunately, the necessary forgeries could not be confirmed by inspection since the original ‘lost’ sheets had been altered before the copies were made. Soal’s work with Shackleton had
been much praised for the precautions taken against fraud, the research had featured in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, and was frequently cited as sound evidence for ESP. After Markwick’s exposure his name virtually disappeared from parapsychological literature.
Soal had been a diligent investigator of mediums for many years and was the author of a long report in SPR Proceedings on some remarkable results through the spiritualist medium Gladys Cooper. When his personal records of these sittings turned up in a second-hand book shop, I conceived the idea of reviewing all his many contributions to see if the Shackleton debacle might have been an isolated lapse. It was not. His second most important experimental research, carried out with the assistance of a former mathematics student, Fred Bateman, was a continuation of Shackleton type tests with another subject, Gloria Stewart. This yielded, over several years, a still larger mass of impressive data, an account of which he published in a book Modern Experiments in Telepathy (London, 1959). He was eventually persuaded to deposit the score sheets from these experiments in the SPR archives at Cambridge University Library. I asked Betty Markwick to help examine these records. It soon became clear that a large proportion were not the originals. The falsifications on one particular score sheet were revealed on a microfiche of the records that Soal had included in the archive. By mistake a photo had been taken of both the original and the fraudulent copy. The differences were clearly visible. On many of what appeared to be original sheets, there were some crudely forged signatures and many very visible alterations of target digits. These, which must have been made after the experimental sessions, had the effect of rectifying a statistical deficiency of doubles (repetitions) in the target digits. The embarrassing deficiency had probably come to notice when examining the score sheets for secondary effects over and above correct guesses. Worse was to come when Betty Markwick noticed, also on apparently original sheets, some more subtle alterations of target digits that coincided with successful guesses. I checked a sample of sheets on which Markwick had detected alterations and found that I could pick these out independently. The changes, were sufficient to account for the above chance guessing on the sheets where they occurred. They must have been made during the recording procedure at the experimental sessions. The inescapable conclusion was that most likely all of Stewart’s allegedly successful guessing was spurious.
In Soal’s later experiments with the Jones boys, Welsh cousins he encountered during stays at his favourite holiday home, one of them acted as telepathic agent and the other as the guesser. At open air sessions, some of which I attended, with the boys screened from each other and separated by 80 ft. or more, they continued to produce scores at times so high that some parapsychologists felt they were too good to be true. One imaginative sceptical theory was that the agent was using a concealed super-sonic whistle. The psychologist Chrisopher Scott went so far as to mount a demonstration of the feasibility of the method. All along, Soal had been resistive to many proposals to impose completely convincing conditions, such as separation in different houses. He may have been guilty of suspecting the boys were cheating, but he was not faking the effects himself because, on a number of occasions, similar results were obtained when he was absent. The boys’ abilities dwindled with the passage of time, and they produced no significant scores when the BBC conducted an acoustically recorded session that would have revealed supersonic signalling. When I interviewed them individually some forty years later they still maintained their performances had been genuine. That tantalising possibility could perhaps have been confirmed had a different investigator than Soal been in charge! Although my study of Soal’s career had begun with a view to finding support for him, the outcome can only reinforce my reputation for undue scepticism.
Soal’s motivation for cheating is a mystery. He was secretive and a loner, yet intellectually gifted, devoting the best part of a lifetime and enormous effort to his questionable investigations. In the matter of the Stewart data, he was immensely diligent in producing convincing copies of a large part of the records while leaving some of the originals with tell-tale signs of forgery. His behaviour was extremely damaging to the reputation of parapsychologists, but it was surely exceptional. His activities are hardly comparable with the collaborative researches of present day parapsychologists working in university departments.
Since the days when I was engaged in card-guessing and dice-throwing, methods of ESP and PK testing have become greatly refined. Computers have taken over and the spectacle of cards being shuffled behind a screen now seems excessively primitive. Software is available that generates (virtual) random sequences of numbers that serve as ESP targets concealed within the computer. The subject under test presses buttons to make his guesses while the machine registers automatically correct and failed matches and delivers a print-out of the results. Human counting errors and the risk of inadequate screening are eliminated. To counteract boredom from forced choice guessing of the same symbols or numbers over and over again the ESP task can be embedded in a computer game, which is actually one of pure chance, so that regular wins become a measure of ESP. One can participate in rigorous professional experiments by locating ESP tests on the web.
Despite the ease with which self-testing can be quickly and reliably carried out at home with computers, no outstandingly gifted ‘psi’ subject has come forward. Star subjects, capable of producing substantial and persistent effects over long periods, have virtually disappeared from the contemporary experimental scene. Parapsychologists working in universities prefer to use as subjects ordinary people, typically students, rather than claimants to dramatic psychic powers, the assumption being that ‘psi’ abilities are present to a weak degree in many people. Whether this is justified is open to dispute.
The advent of electronic random event generators rendered testing PK by dice throwing similarly outmoded. Utilising random emissions of electrons from weak radioactive materials, REGs can feed into a computer a rapid sequence of truly random target numbers. The experimenter selects a particular target and asks the person being tested to ‘will’ the production of a statistical excess of that target. Targets can be delivered at speed and a great deal of data produced in a relatively short time, so even tiny effects yield statistically significant deviations. The energy supposedly involved in causing such distortions would seem to be tiny in comparison to what would be needed to alter the movements of dice.
Notwithstanding impressive advances in experimental techniques and many ingenious schemes meant to encourage ‘psi’, no clear picture of the processes involved in ESP or PK has emerged. The very existence of ‘psi’ effects is disbelieved by most scientists. The size of the effects reported from the best run experiments today is usually much smaller than was the case in earlier years. Devices that might be expected to facilitate success, such as selecting highly motivated, confident, well-rewarded subjects, having numerous subjects aiming at the same target, or counting deviations from chance in either negative or positive direction have on occasion appeared to give results, but there is no protocol that guarantees a strictly repeatable demonstration, a basic requirement in the physical sciences.
There is a puzzling lack of consistency in what have been claimed to be features of ‘psi’. The secondary patterns of scoring, supposedly a confirmatory characteristic – such as alternating positive and negative scoring, displacement (i.e. focusing in symbols adjacent to the target), and decline in scoring from the beginning of a run with recovery towards the end – seem no longer to be reported. Extroversion was once thought to be typical of successful subjects, but nowadays ‘schizotypy’, a quality more akin to introversion, is more often cited. All too often, experimenters have introduced conditions thought to increase positive scoring, only to find negative scoring instead or to conclude that outcomes depend on the vagaries of individual subjects.
Some years ago, at a conference at Trinity College, Cambridge, there was a discussion of Spotiswood’s observation that ESP scoring tended to peak at particula
r phases of sidereal time. This was a correlation that could be checked in data from past and future experiments, wherever the timing of guessing is fully recorded. Sir Andrew Huxley remarked that in view of this we should be in a position to know in a few years’ time whether ESP is a reality. Due to the uncertainty of outcome in the rather few attempts at verification of the correlation with sidereal time that have been published, that dream has not been fulfilled. It remains to be seen whether a similar fate awaits attempts to substantiate reports of correlations between ‘psi’ effects and variations in ambient geomagnetism.
Even the most gifted subjects of the past had no awareness of how they achieved success, and could not say whether an individual guess was correct until the target was revealed. Experimenters have sought to obtain clearer results in telepathy experiments by circumventing the guessing requirement and testing for unconscious physiological responses. Typically, a distant agent, preferably someone emotionally close to the subject, is given at random intervals a succession of sharp stimuli, such as a pin prick or a sudden noise. The subject under test is wired up to a lie detector type instrument, registering changes in skin resistance and other measures indicative of an emotional reaction. If detectable responses occur synchronously with the times of stimulation of the agent, this is evidence of some paranormal transmission. More recently, a similar procedure seeks to make use of the fact that a physiological response is detectable before a person becomes conscious of a stimulus – the presentiment effect. Experimenters have tried to establish that the anticipatory response can occur a moment before the stimulus begins, which would imply real precognition. At the time of writing, this research is in its early stages and the outcome remains uncertain.
