. . .

And most horribly, at Brigham Young University in 1976, Dr. D. Eugene Thorne, head of BYU’s Psychology Department, oversaw Ph.D. student Max Ford McBride in his PhD dissertation that involved experiments on Gay men using Gay and Straight pornography with electric-shock therapy. They started out with 16 Gay male BYU students and staff, but two committed suicide during the experiment, so the study only ended up with 14 subjects.

Now Stephen James Matthew Price (who later changed his name to Stephan "Zak" Zakharias), a 22-year-old Gay convert to the church from Davis, CA (near Sacramento) was living in Utah at the time and personally knew the two men who had committed suicide during Thorne and McBride’s electric shock therapy on them, and this became the driving force behind his conviction that a support group for Gay Mormons needed to be formed ultimately in order to prevent any further suicides.

. . .