Alan Turing and What It Means to be Gay

By Philip Go

Alan Turing is, in every sense of the word, a hero. His efforts in cracking the Enigma – an
encryption device used by the Germans during World War II to transmit coded messages – were
instrumental in the Allied forces’ eventual victory over the German Nazis. As a testament to his
brilliance and formidable intellect, Turing cracked a code thought to be unbreakable. Invented at
the end of World War I by German engineer Arthur Scherbius, the Enigma was an incredible feat
of cryptography with over 159 quintillion possible settings – that’s 159 followed by 18(!) zeroes.
To illustrate the sheer impossibility of decrypting such a device, if you had 10 men checking 1
setting every minute, 24/7, it would still take them 20 million years to go through every possible
setting. This, coupled with the fact that the Germans used a different setting every day, made the
machine near impossible to break. But Alan Turing did it. His work is estimated to have shortened
the war by more than 2 years and saved over 14 million lives.
Unfortunately for Turing, he was gay. And I say unfortunate not because he was gay, but
because he lived during a time when his sexual orientation would lead to his untimely death.
On June 7, 1954, 2 weeks before his 42nd birthday, Alan Turing took his own life by taking
a bite out of an apple believed to have been laced with cyanide. After being convicted of “gross
indecency with a male” in 1952, Turing was offered hormonal treatment as an alternative to prison
in what has to be the worst “would you rather” question ever asked. In the end, he chose chemical
castration, which consisted of injections of the female hormone estrogen designed to “suppress”
his homosexuality. According to one of his biographers, Turing’s conviction set the genius on a
“slow, sad descent into grief and madness.” In addition to the world losing one of its most brilliant
minds, Turing’s death was symbolic and representative of the treatment and inequality gay people
had to endure during his time.
Up until 1967, Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 made homosexuality
a crime in the U.K. More commonly known as the Labouchere Amendment, the act states that
“Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or
procures, or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency
shall be guilty of misdemeanour, and being convicted shall be liable at the discretion of the Court
to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour." However,
due to the vagueness of the term “gross indecency,” the law enabled the persecution of virtually
any homosexual behavior. Playwright Oscar Wilde was famously convicted in 1895 under section
11 and sentenced to two years of hard labor. His health would decline in prison, and in 1900, only
3 years after his release, he died at the tender age of 46.
The convictions of both Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing, in addition to the thousands of other
gay men wrongfully convicted throughout the years, highlight our society’s historical intolerance
for people who are “different.” A lot has been said about our capacity for compassion and empathy,
but history would beg to differ. As numerous events can attest, our species’ history can be
described as a slow, gradual, and often painful crawl towards a more progressive and accepting
society.
Racial segregation in the United States created an unnecessary rift between whites and
people of color. The segregation system was made to keep African Americans in a subordinate
status by denying them equal access to public facilities and ensuring that they lived apart from
whites. It was customary to see signboards in restrooms, drinking fountains, and other public
facilities with an arrow to the left for “whites” and an arrow to the right for “colored.” There were
even laundry signboards that read “We wash for white people only” and restaurants that hung “No
Dogs, Negroes, and Mexicans” banners.
Anti-Semitism, the prejudice and discrimination against Jews, fueled the extermination of
over 6 million Jews during The Holocaust. The Nazis believed the Aryan race to be the most
advanced form of humanity and, as such, had to be protected and fostered. On the other hand,
degenerate humans like the Jews had to be quarantined and even killed. As we now know from
books like Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl and Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for
Meaning, Jewish prisoners were routinely forced to march into gas chambers designed for mass
killing.
And perhaps most ironically, religion throughout history has been the catalyst for
bloodshed. Holy wars have slaughtered millions over a mere difference in belief. In what is now
known as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slain
by Catholics on August 23, 1572 as part of the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants
during the 16th and 17th centuries.
As history shows us, ideologies and cultures that enforce an intolerance for people who are
“different” or perhaps for those who share different beliefs from us only serve to draw us further
apart from each other and undermine the very essence of our humanity. It has claimed the lives of
millions of people, including those like Turing, who, despite having made extraordinary
contributions to his country and the world, was cast away and rejected.
Alan Turing’s life is the story of how Britain drove its wartime hero and one of the world’s
greatest geniuses to suicide…just for being gay. If we are to fully realize our potential as a society,
we must break free from the shackles of prejudice, injustice, and bigotry that have held us back
for so long.
Being gay in Turing’s time meant being oppressed, discriminated against, and persecuted.
Our job is to create a world where being gay means being embraced, accepted, and celebrated.

*For questions, comments, and suggestions, feel free to email me at frenchtoastphilip@gmail.com