This black-and-white photograph of a medical container fitted with a long plastic tube might appear, at first glance, innocuous.

But it's a penile plethysmograph: a device used to measure changes in penis volume in response to erotic prompts.

Dubbed a "penis lie detector", it was used by a Sydney-based psychiatrist who conducted gay aversion therapy sessions in the late 1960s and 1970s.

The application of Neil McConaghy's homemade device — and how it was received by the public, researchers and LGBTIQ activists — reveals a great deal about changing attitudes towards homosexuality in Australia.

'Treating' homosexuality with aversion therapy

Dr McConaghy in the 1950s (left) and 1960s (right). ( Supplied: Neil McConaghy Papers/ Kate Davison )

In an era where homosexuality was not only classified as a medical disorder, but illegal in Australia, Dr McConaghy was a major proponent of aversion therapy.

"Aversion therapy was an attempt to alter or amend human behaviours that are seen to be aberrant or abnormal by psycho-physiological methods," says Kate Davison, a PhD student at the University of Melbourne.

"That is, by creating a combined physical and psychological association between that behaviour and an unpleasant feeling or sensation."

Ms Davison first discovered the photograph while researching Dr McConaghy's personal archives.

She describes the object as akin to a "penis lie detector" — with a few key differences.

"It was invented precisely to try to overcome some of the inherent weaknesses of tests like the lie detector test," she says.

Kate Davison has been researching Dr McConaghy's work. ( Supplied: Kate Davison )

While a lie detector gauged emotional fluctuation, the penile plethysmograph worked through a more physiological mechanism.

"The metal fitting on the other end of the tube would go into a machine which is called a transducer, and a transducer is an electronic machine that measures volume change," Ms Davison explains.

"And that transducer would be connected to — people might be familiar with the image of a polygraph — so you have a pencil attached to a lever that records changes on a piece of paper.

"It's basically designed to test responses to erotic stimuli."

The moving images could include anything from naked men and women to — puzzlingly — trains arriving or leaving a station, ducks and swans in a pond in London's Hyde Park, or people crossing bridges on the Thames.

'I could start a whole new life'

Fabian LoSchiavo was one of the men Dr McConaghy "treated".

In 1973, as an inpatient in a psychiatric ward in Sydney, Mr LoSchiavo undertook aversion therapy three times a day for a week.

Fabian LoSchiavo first sought Dr McConaghy's therapy to 'get rid' of his sexuality. ( Getty: Lisa Maree Williams/ Stringer )

"There's two Fabians: there's the one that loved the intimacy, then the other one who hated it, who wanted to get rid of my sexuality," he says.

"Professor McConaghy said to me: 'What we are going to do for you is we're going to be able to inhibit your sexuality, and that will mean you won't be compelled to go and do the things that are upsetting you.'

"It was exciting because I thought I might be able to get rid of my sexuality altogether and maybe go back to the seminary and lead a life without these troubling desires."

Mr LoSchiavo was warned by some friends not to sign up for the voluntary aversion therapy, but he was incapable of registering their dissent.

"[Those voices] weren't as strong as the ones that were saying to me, 'I could start a whole new life now,' without this thorn in my side and the thing that exposes me to sadness and heartache and sickness, disease."

Mr LoSchiavo, pictured here in 1978, first met Dr McConaghy in 1973. ( Getty: Lisa Maree Williams/ Stringer )

He still remembers the abject humiliation of being exposed to the plethysmograph.

"They put the wires on your fingers and then put your penis in that thing that is in the photograph, then you sat down and waited, and sometimes a slide would come up and you'd get a shock, sometimes you wouldn't get a shock," he says.

"When I look at it … it brings back a certain embarrassment, because I had to undo my trousers and pull them down, to put that thing on, and I felt very uncomfortable and embarrassed."

Six months after the week-long treatment, he was due to return for a treatment 'booster', but says by that stage he'd had enough.

"I felt at the end of that week, I'd paid the price … I'd done everything I can to do what the Church or God wants me to do, and that was it," he says.

Not 'zapping the gay away'

Alongside the plethysmograph, Dr McConaghy used apomorphine and electric shocks for the conditioning part of the treatment: either injecting morphine at a dose that would induce nausea when men were shown photographs of other men, or giving them an electric shock as the photographs were shown.

Dr McConaghy used these aversion therapy techniques not to convert his patients, but to inhibit what were then deemed "deviant" desires.

"He was not interested in 'zapping the gay away'," Ms Davison says.

Dr Neil McConaghy practiced psychiatry in Sydney. ( Supplied: Neil McConaghy Papers/ Kate Davison )

"He felt what he was doing was assisting patients come to terms with the current social constraints … in whatever way that happened."

Sue Wills, a political scientist and LGBTIQ activist, agrees.

"He was doing two things, I think: one, he was helping people who wanted to change their sexual orientation ... but also, he was very, very curious about the way the brain worked in terms of sexuality," says Dr Wills.

As a founding member of Campaign Against Moral Persecution (CAMP), she interviewed Dr McConaghy in the 1970s and campaigned against his practices.

Her mission, in addition to educating church groups and school groups, was to try and convince Dr McConaghy that "the biggest problem homosexuals faced was not their homosexuality but people's reaction to it".

"In other words, it was the beginning of us talking about homophobia," she says.

Patients stopped as public opinion turned

While Dr Willis found that direct lobbying to Dr McConaghy was fruitless, the tide of public opinion on the effectiveness of the treatment was changing.

"I had thought, naïvely, [that] we could get McConaghy to stop offering aversion therapy," Dr Wills says.

"It didn't work like that, I think he had too much invested in it career-wise.

"But what did happen was we convinced homosexuals to stop going and getting treatment … so he stopped doing it because he didn't have any patients."

Kate Davison points out that at the end of his career, Dr McConaghy also doubted the effectiveness of aversion therapy, and the Pavlovian theories that founded it.

"He disputed, in the end, the idea that aversion therapy acted by a mechanism of conditioning," she says.

"This was one of the reasons why he abandoned it. Another reason was that he was affected by the gay liberation movement."

Dr McConaghy died in 2005, but if Fabian LoSchiavo could speak to him today, he says he would still have a few questions.

"I would say to him, 'Why? Why were you doing it?'," says Mr LoSchiavo.

"But I don't think I'd want to throttle him. I think I'd understand that he, for his own reasons, was caught up with this understanding of psychiatry."