GLR September-October 2025

order, through petitions filed by family or friends, or after a crim inal case prompted an examination. Transfers from correctional institutions required no judicial review. The conceit among psy chiatrists and psychologists was that every mental disorder could be corrected by the proper combination of psychotherapy, seda tives, neurological treatments, and surgery, and that every per sonality trait they deemed undesirable was a mental disorder. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) was considered something of a cure-all in the 1950s. To this day, there is no theoretical ex planation for why inducing a grand mal seizure should relieve a mental disorder: ECT is essentially the medical equivalent of bang ing on a television set to improve the picture. In the postwar era, it was administered with no anesthetic at a much higher voltage than is used today, and as a continuous wave rather than a brief pulse. The moment between the application of current and the onset of unconsciousness was described as giving the sensation that the brain was exploding, a feeling so terrible that threats of further treatments were enough to keep unruly hospital patients in line. Aftereffects included confusion that persisted for days and mem ory loss that could be permanent. The shocks were applied two or three times a week until the symptoms of the disorder disappeared. For homosexuals, the symptoms never went away. The last resort for those who hadn’t responded to other ther apies was lobotomy. California subscribed to the transorbital ished. Success was measured by the lack of behavioral prob lems. Preserving the patient’s intellect and individuality was not a consideration. Twenty-nine icepick lobotomies were performed at Mendo cino State Hospital in 1953 and early ’54. The number was small compared to the patient population, but it was undoubtedly a sig nificant concern for a group of juvenile delinquents with a recent history of violent behavior and a diagnosed mental disorder that couldn’t be “corrected” by other means. The juvenile court judge heading a committee to investigate Los Guilucos claimed rioters hadn’t understood that the girls who were transferred to Napa and Mendocino were merely being sent to places where they’d receive more appropriate care. In truth, the girls of Los Guilucos had good reason to be angry and afraid. At half past eight on Monday morning, rioting flared up again. Forty or fifty girls bolted from their morning exercises and ran to the school hospital to free the eleven still held in O & T. Once more they began smashing windows, many of them replaced only the day before. Sheriff’s deputies chased the girls into a nearby dormitory, where they screamed profanities from doorways and windows. The building was surrounded and the girls penned in for an hour while school officials worked on procuring a court order to send the so-called ringleaders to jail. As deputies began separating the more violent girls from the rest, all hell broke loose. The girls used chairs to bash windows and hurled shards of broken glass at the officers, tore steel slats from beds and used them to shatter more windows, smash the or “icepick” method, in which a long steel spike was inserted through the eye socket to sever the connection between thalamus and frontal lobes in a ten-minute operation. Post-surgery, patients would be tranquil, smiling, and vacant. Memory, intelligence, capacity for higher thinking, and control of bodily functions were often severely dimin

furniture, and gouge the walls. One girl was badly cut on the leg trying to climb through a broken window. An officer was knocked flat by a solid punch to the face. Four girls escaped the police cordon and fled the grounds. They were picked up more than an hour later, two miles away. School officials called out for help and six Santa Rosa offi cers were dispatched. A security force of more than thirty herded the girls into the dormitory’s basement, and the riot was shut down. Thirteen were immediately led away in handcuffs. Six teen more were brought out shortly afterward. Eventually 41 were separated from the general population for removal—ap parently there were quite a few “ringleaders.” For an hour they were shuttled in police cruisers, eight carloads in all, from the school to the Sonoma County Jail, where they were held in two large tanks cleared especially for them. At one o’clock that afternoon, CYA and school officials held a board of review at the jail to determine the fates of those held there. It was decided that ten would be sent to Napa and seven to Mendocino. The rest would be scattered to detention homes across the state. Of the 159 girls who’d populated the school on Thursday evening, only 91 would remain. Sixty-eight were sent elsewhere, including all fifteen who’d been brought from Los Angeles since January and were blamed for the rise in homo sexuality and other troubles. At the school, all was calm. Los rived at the school Thursday evening, less than an hour after the first riot had begun. Herbert had been allowed to observe the review board’s interviews with some of the girls. From those sessions, along with private discussions with the school psy chologist, a dorm supervisor, a part-time school chaplain, an in mate’s mother, and a few girls he’d interviewed during the riots, he pieced together an elaborate social structure at the school, centering on lesbian relationships and embodying its own unique ethos, language, and rites of passage. His story hit the front page on Wednesday afternoon. The two girls transferred to Napa on Thursday were “dad dies,” the heads of surrogate family units the girls had estab lished. They bragged about being lesbians and vowed they’d never have a man. Beneath them was a family tree of “sons,” “daughters,” “brothers,” “sisters,” and “in-laws,” based on mu tual pairings and sexual roles. Submissive, typically younger girls were known as “chicks,” while their dominant, usually older counterparts were “gals” or “votts”—a word possibly de rived from the Mexican slang term vato , equivalent to the mod ern American dude . One fifteen-year-old described a variety of sexual acts to Herbert in explicit detail, illustrating some with hand gestures before adding with a smile: “I guess quite a few of the girls did it. I wouldn’t know.” The girls reveled in discussing their sexual activities openly, under the noses of the supervisors, using their secret code. They were especially proud of a complex system they’d constructed for performing wedding ceremonies to formalize partnerships. Guilucos officials and the remaining girls proclaimed the violence was over, but there was another headline to come. § F RANK H ERBERT was a reporter for Santa Rosa’s Press Democrat who’d been im mersed in the story from the start: He’d ar

The violence at Los Guilucos was the largest and most publicized LGBT uprising in the U.S. un ti l Stonewall in 1969.

September–October 2025

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