Oaks categorically denied that BYU had used electroshock therapies on gay students during his tenure from 1971 to 1980. “When I became president of BYU, that had been discontinued earlier,” Oaks said in answer to a question about those treatments, “and it never went on under my administration.” According to researcher Gregory Prince and others, that statement is demonstrably false. In his 2019 book, “Gay Rights and the Mormon Church: Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences,” Prince cites “university-approved” research in 1976 by then-BYU graduate student Max McBride with 14 gay subjects. The male subjects were hooked up to monitors that measured their arousal when shown photos of nude men or women.

If the subject “experienced sexual arousal from a photograph of a nude male, he would receive a shock in the bicep,” Prince reported about the McBride research. “A gradual increase of voltage upon repeated arousals was to serve as a negative feedback stimulus that would, according to the hypothesis, ‘reorient’ him from homosexual to heterosexual, whereupon photographs of nude females were supposed to elicit sexual arousal.”