QUEER HISTORY / QUEER MEMORY

The Case of Alan Turing

Laura Doan

Just before 5 p.m. on Tuesday, June 8, 1954, the body of Alan Turing was dis-
covered at his home on the Adlington Road in Wilmslow, Cheshire, by his house-
keeper, Mrs. Eliza Clayton. According to her deposition made at the inquest, Clay-
ton had been in the employ of the University of Manchester as a mathematician
and computer scientist for about three years.1 She recollected that on arriving with
the shopping to prepare his evening meal, two things struck her as “unusual”:
before entering the house, she spotted a light in the upstairs bedroom, and, on
ascending to the top floor, she saw that Turing’s shoes were placed neatly “outside
his bedroom door.” When her employer did not respond to her knock, she entered
the room and “saw froth all round his mouth”; the “touch” of his hand was “cold.”
A police sergeant who soon arrived did not comment on the shoes but recalled a
“faint smell of bitter almonds” and also observed a “white frothy liquid about the
mouth” of the pajama-­clad deceased. 2 Finding “no signs of life,” the policeman
noticed two items on a bedside table: a “half slice of apple” with several bite marks
and a gentleman’s wristwatch indicating the “correct time.” He then proceeded
to a back bedroom used by Turing to carry out “electrical experiments” — and
again detected the smell of potassium cyanide near a pan filled with a “bubbling”
liquid.
These small sensory details — a bright electric light, a distinctive odor, a
half-­eaten apple, the temperature of a body, the sounds of ticking and gurgling — 
evoke an experience of the past as haptic and intuitive. For LGBT and/or queer-­
identified people aware of Turing’s sexuality, his arrest in 1952 on charges of gross
indecency, and his “barbaric” punishment (organotherapy, or chemical castration
in lieu of prison), such spaces and objects take on added resonance, an encounter
historians associate with memory. Not individual memory, as in the personal recol-

GLQ 23:1
DOI 10.1215/10642684-3672321
© 2017 by Duke University Press

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 114 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

lections of what each witness claimed to have seen, touched, smelled, or heard two
days earlier, but collective memory, the social phenomenon or cultural dimension
of what groups remember (Halbwachs 1992).3 As the stuff of collective memory,
the depositions capture the tactile immediacy of a past event that binds the politi-
cal identity of a group “already well established” (Megill 2007: 47, emphasis origi-
nal), in this case, the death of a man who, as the LGBT History Month (n.d.) web-
site puts it, is a “classic example” of “how society’s prejudice . . . has often robbed
them of a dignified and fulfilling life.”4 Reading the depositions feelingly through
the senses to narrow the temporal distance between then and now allows the bed-
room scene to become a “site of memory” (Nora 1989: 7 – 24), a mode of historici-
zation that historians often find troubling.5 As the stuff of historical investigation,
the depositions provide vital evidence to adduce what is no longer known, since
“the principal relation of the historian to the past is an engagement with absence”
(Spiegel 2009: 4). Evidence enables the historian of sexuality, for instance, to
explore any number of questions about the structure, organization, and circulation
of sexual knowledge in Britain at the midpoint of the last century, adding to an
ever-­expanding field concerned with the sexed body and its gendering; the social
meanings of acts, identities, desires, and erotic pleasures; or the moral or legal
regulation of sexual practices, among other topics. Doing historical writing as a
historian “always involves a truth-­claim” (White 2007: 227) to ensure a “reason-
able chance of getting the story right,” this narrative dimension widely regarded
as utterly distinct from the “made-­up fiction” of collective memory (Munslow
2012: 29, 8).6
In what follows I examine how historians have thought about collective
memory to bring a new perspective to debates in queer studies between literary
scholars whose disagreements about how to navigate the past in reading texts seem
equally irreconcilable. The tendency of many historians to situate their practice as
diametrically opposed to collective memory, I argue, is highly relevant to discus-
sions between literary scholars who understand the project of queer temporalities
as either historical writing or as an alternative to historical writing.7 This latter
polarization is due in no small part to the different meanings ascribed to history
itself, as evident in a 2007 roundtable discussion published in GLQ on “theoriz-
ing queer temporalities,” in which the term history denotes “the past” but also the
discipline that makes that past legible (Dinshaw et al. 2007). I find this exchange
between leading queer literary and cultural critics interesting for several reasons.
First, it exposes constraints in characterizing queer criticism as historical work, a
habit arising from the conflation of “history” and “historicism.”8 Second, it demon-
strates the inadequacy of a single homogenizing rubric — queer temporalities — to

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 QUEER HISTORY / QUEER MEMORY 115

account for different approaches across the disciplines to the past and pastness in
queer studies. Third, and perhaps most relevant to my chief concern here, it points
to an apparent impasse in one strand of queer temporalities in which practitioners
present their interventions as either for or against history as a field of academic
study. This divide has since deepened with the recent publication of Valerie Traub
(2013), which offers an incisive critique of arguments advanced by early modern
critics who have challenged what they perceive as the progressivist impulses in
the writing of the history of homosexual identity. However, as is the case with
the history-­versus-­memory debates, this article’s mapping of queer temporalities
as historicist or unhistoricist consolidates an oppositionality that, while helpful
in highlighting pressure points in method, purpose, and theoretical perspective,
obscures the affinities and overlaps of praxis.9
I am less interested in providing a comprehensive overview of the turn in
queer studies toward time than in assessing the epistemological consequences aris-
ing from the polarization of historicizing practices (whether configured as history
against memory or historicism against unhistoricism). My discussion of the case of
Turing in the context of critical history and memory will demonstrate to queer his-
toricists and unhistoricists alike the importance of thinking self-­reflexively about
what we want from our engagements with the past and how oppositionality both
limits and expands historical understanding of that past. For the critical historian
invested in the radical alterity of the past, any historical practice — regardless of
disciplinary focus or methodological approach — interested in an affective connec-
tion or disconnection with queerness across time determines and overdetermines
what can be known about the sexual past. Without minimizing the very real dif-
ferences between critical historians and the makers of collective memory, or queer
practitioners receptive to history (or historicism) and those who have little time
for it, preferring instead the discursive frameworks of philosophy, philosophy of
history, and psychoanalysis, I want to suggest that the dichotomization of modes
of pastness might offer only a partial explanation of what is a far messier affair.10
To think about historicizing practices as other than opposites to be reconciled and
instead as pathways intertwined, overlapping, each bleeding into the other, I pro-
pose to look at the case of Turing from two vantage points: as collective memory
and as history.
Like many others, I am fascinated by Turing, but let me acknowledge at
the outset I am not an expert on his life or work. I could not begin to adequately
describe his mathematical theory of morphogenesis or unravel the intricate
workings of the “universal Turing machine,” to cite two of his major intellectual
achievements.11 Nor have I uncovered anything new in the archive or developed

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 116 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

a bold revisionist interpretation of his ultimate fate. The specter of Turing haunts
this article because he is a person of interest across multiple and diverse constitu-
encies from science buffs to political activists, queer studies practitioners to histo-
rians of homosexuality. In other words, I am less interested in Turing himself than
in the immense interest shown in Turing as a queer saint of the digital age, a life
and legacy both historicized and memorialized. Recent commemorative activities,
along with a prominent political campaign to pardon the “49,000 men” convicted
in Britain for committing acts of gross indecency, provide a rich archive of materi-
als in which to assess the difference methodology makes in constructing narra-
tives of pastness.12 How debates between historians relate to the fractious debates
between queer historicists and unhistoricists might not be immediately apparent
to scholars with primary interests in collapsing “time through affective contact
between marginalized people now and then” (Dinshaw et al. 2007: 178). Yet I con-
tend that historians’ unease toward memory yields crucial insights in evaluating
what is at stake — politically, ethically, affectively — in the queer desire to belong
to “History” (Dinshaw et al. 2007: 179). Throughout this article I rely on the very
polarities I seek to trouble. I use these categories — history and memory, histori-
cism and unhistoricism — not because I believe that they convey intellectual and
cultural work with utmost precision but because they capture with utmost conci-
sion the salient features and foundational assumptions of practices that continually
rub one against the other. To queer historicists who express an “overwhelming
desire to feel historical” (Nealon 2001), I suggest that the history-­versus-­memory
debates demonstrate historicist practices as both congruent and incongruent with
the practice of history now. To queer unhistoricists tempted to dismiss academic
history as little more than “empirical data collection” (Muñoz 2009: 27) or the
arrangement of facts in chronological order, I propose the value of scrutinizing
closely how historians do their work (Halberstam 2013). By differentiating histori-
cist and unhistoricist methods in relation to critical historical methods, we can bet-
ter grasp how an enduring interest in “intersubjective collectivity” (Freccero 2007:
492) inevitably pulls toward the affective dynamics of memory rather than history,
a presentist frame that critical historians find suspect. If we are serious about pro-
ducing knowledge of the past in all its complexity — that is, as something we think
that we know already as well as pastness in all its radical strangeness — it is vital
to grasp the epistemological consequences in conceptualizing practices in opposi-
tional terms, a tendency pervasive among historians and queer specialists alike.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 QUEER HISTORY / QUEER MEMORY 117

Come Together Right Now

A Google search of Alan Turing generates over forty-­three million hits in twenty-­
one seconds. Readers can instantly access the pair of sworn depositions I dis-
cussed above, as well as others made by Turing’s brother, a neighbor, a detective-­
photographer, and a pathologist, simply by entering the word inquest into the
search engine of the Turing Digital Archive. Users can download a digitized image
of a cyclostyled copy of the postmortem examination report and even the enve-
lope in which it was contained.13 These documents represent only the tip of the
iceberg. Staff based in the Archive Center at King’s College, Cambridge, Turing’s
undergraduate college, have scanned and uploaded some three thousand images of
correspondence, photographs, newspaper cuttings, and unpublished papers and,
in so doing, produced an exceptional online resource for the professional historian
or biographer, scholars in LGBT or queer studies, political activists, journalists,
politicians, filmmakers, bloggers, and — yes — fans.
The “universal Turing machine” might easily be mistaken for the global
media frenzy that surrounds Turing, reaching new heights in 2012 with the cen-
tenary of his birth. All year long, inside and outside the academy, celebrations
and commemorations took the form of conferences, lectures, museum exhibitions,
fellowship competitions, news stories, and television programs. And yet inter-
est in Turing is not new but stretches back at least three decades, sparked by an
authoritative, exhaustively researched, and hugely influential biography published
in 1983 by the mathematician and Oxford don Andrew Hodges, titled Alan Tur-
ing: The Enigma of Intelligence. Other biographies have appeared, including The
Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer, by the
novelist David Leavitt (2006), as well as, Gottfried 1996, Turing [1959] 2012, and
Copeland 2012. In 1992 the BBC aired a documentary directed by Christopher
Sykes (The Strange Life and Death of Dr. Turing) as part of the Horizon series,
and in 1997 it produced a film version of the 1986 play by Hugh Whitemore titled
Breaking the Code, starring Derek Jacobi — and the list goes on, with the broad-
casting in 2011 by Channel 4 of an award-­winning drama documentary called
Codebreaker. A new Hollywood biopic, The Imitation Game (directed by Morten
Tyldum), appeared in 2014, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightly in
the leading roles, introducing a “heterosexual” angle that, for some observers,
threatens Turing’s iconic status in the modern history of homosexual emancipation.
The recent success of the campaign to grant Turing a posthumous royal pardon,
announced by the British government on December 24, 2013, indicates that Tur-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 118 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

ing mania shows little sign of abating, the biographical facts of his life bound up
with myth and varying degrees of poetic license.14
It is hardly surprising, then, that Turing features prominently in a collec-
tive memory experience sustained by LGBT and queer organizations with political
investments in configuring Turing as a gay icon or “homo hero.” As one website
conjectures, “Had Turing been alive today, he would have rightly been celebrated
as a hero” (BBC News June 22, 2012), which is precisely the objective of collec-
tive memory in binding groups to an “eternal present” to fulfill political needs and
utopic desires (Nora 1989: 8). Collective memory envisages an “undifferentiated
time of heroes, origins, and myth,” emphasizing achievement and pride but also
persecution, suffering, and struggle (ibid.). Cast as “incontrovertibly Other,” Tur-
ing’s “homosexuality” defines him: “interpreted by the legal system as a crime, by
the medical profession as a malfunction, and by the government as a liability. . . .
He had a sexual secret that the enemy . . . could prey upon” (Halberstam 1991:
444). In this way, the question “what was Alan Turing really like?” is never really
a question at all. Rather, it is an invitation to recite in catechism-­like fashion the
salient details of the icon’s life: the “tortured gay genius” who fell “foul of the
draconian anti-­gay laws of the period,” “lacerated by 1950s attitudes to sexuality,”
and “subjected to chemical castration for the crime of being gay” (Dowd 2014).
Memory dips into the archive selectively, and so its stories “may be out of focus
or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic — responsive . . . to every
censorship or projection” (Nora 1989: 8). Collective memory confirms and con-
solidates, distills and simplifies, as evidenced in the rituals of commemoration. A
good example of collective remembrance can be found in the heart of Manches-
ter’s gay village. Unveiled in 2001 on Turing’s birthday, June 23, the Alan Turing
Memorial (fig. 1) represents the quintessence of a site of memory at once “affective
and magical” (ibid.). Just how magical was driven home to me by an extraordinary
event a colleague of mine witnessed early one Sunday morning, with the revelry in
the nearby gay bars on Canal Street still going strong. Passing by Sackville Park,
he noticed “a young guy, completely naked posing with Alan”: “I seem to recall a
bit of oral sex (if you follow me — Alan seemed oblivious). Meanwhile a bloke who
was clothed was taking pictures” (David Matthews, pers. comm., December 18,
2013). This incident — mediated by testimony — points to the power of commemo-
ration in animating the “real emotions of real people” (Nussbaum 2013: 382), its
power manifested in the intimate comingling of “body, place, and psyche” (Casey
2000: 252). Capturing the most “meaning in the fewest of signs” (Nora 1989: 19),
a bronze tablet placed at the figure’s feet reads as follows: “Father of Computer
Science, Mathematician, Logician, Wartime Codebreaker, Victim of Prejudice.”

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 QUEER HISTORY / QUEER MEMORY 119

Figure 1. The Alan Turing Memorial in Sackville Park, Manchester, 2001,

Glyn Hughes, sculptor. Author photo.

Such contradictory referents — the mathematical genius who saved England from

Nazi tyranny and the defiant, though vulnerable, gay man punished by the archaic
laws of the British state — tell us more about the cultural dynamics of commem-
oration than the commemorated object around which the “mystical community”
forms (Lévy-­Bruhl 1966: 62). At a site of celebration and mourning, the affec-
tive and tactile experience of commemoration takes root “in spaces, gestures,
images, and objects” (Nora 1989: 9), hence the potency of the apple held in Tur-
ing’s upturned hand. Reminiscent of shrines in which the venerated saint motions
to the instrument of martyrdom, the cyanide-­laced apple is a poignant reminder of

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 120 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

how homophobia drove one of the world’s “greatest minds” to suicide.15 Sites — and
websites — of collective memory, whether the Turing Memorial in Sackville Park or
heritage walks, blogs, tweets, and online commentary, translate the past into terms
we understand now, a transaction valuable to the groups concerned yet troubling
to the historian who worries endlessly about the coming of a “new age in which
archives remember and statues forget” (Klein 2000: 136).

Seeing Who Turing Really Was

Alan Mathison Turing was born in London in 1912 to comfortable upper-­middle-­

class parents, his father a member of the Indian civil service, his mother the
daughter of a chief engineer of the Madras railways (Hodges, n.d.). After attending
Hazlehurst Preparatory School, Turing was sent to the elite public school Sher-
borne before going up to Cambridge to read mathematics in 1931, graduating
three years later. In 1935 he became a Fellow of King’s, where he began work on
mathematical logic that would be foundational in modern computer science. After
a stint at Princeton, he returned to England and, at the start of World War II,
worked as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park. He became a key figure in decoding
the encryptions of the Enigma machine, a project that, it has been argued, has-
tened the end of the war by two years. By 1948 he was employed at the University
of Manchester, engaged in research on computer development and programming
until, in 1952, his life changed dramatically as a result of a brief relationship with
a working-­class lad from Wythenshawe named Arnold Murray. After a friend of
Murray’s broke into Turing’s Wilmslow home, he reported the crime at the local
police station on February 3, 1952. Four days later, according to documents held
in the Cheshire Record Office, when two detectives turned up on his front door-
step, Turing “blurted out everything that they wanted to hear . . . admitting that
he had concealed” Murray’s identity because of having “ ‘had an affair with him’ ”
(Hodges [1983] 1987: 457). Turing then sat down and wrote out a five-­page state-
ment, freely detailing his sexual activities with Murray with no sense of shame or
embarrassment — a royal commission, he told the police, was considering legaliz-
ing “it.”16 Whatever Turing meant by “it,” he was wrong — Section 11 of the Crimi-
nal Law Amendment Act of 1885 (known also as the Labouchere Amendment)
would be the law of the land until 1967, when the Sexual Offences Act decriminal-
ized private sexual acts between men over the age of twenty-­one (Criminal Law
Amendment Act, 1885, www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1967/60/contents). The con-
fession led to Turing’s arrest, trial, conviction, and punishment — events that can

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 QUEER HISTORY / QUEER MEMORY 121

be verified in documents deposited in the archive, that repository of fragments

available to makers of queer history, collective memory, and literary and cultural
critics with interests in affect and the reconfigurations of time and space.
Even so, very little is actually known about Turing’s private life and even
less about his innermost thoughts as a desiring subject. Tantalizing hints appear
fleetingly in unlikely places, such as a syllogism he composed in a letter to a friend
in mid-­February 1952:

Turing believes machines think

Turing lies with men
Therefore machines do not think.17

Signed “yours in distress,” Turing’s anguish is palpable, the conclusion inferring

his sexual practices negate his research on artificial intelligence. Hodges ([1983]
1987: 530) notes that the mathematician was an intensely private individual and
that “there is very little source material from which to reconstruct a picture of
Alan Turing — few original documents, and little in the way of published commen-
tary. Secrecy and embarrassment of various kinds are partly responsible, but there
is a paucity of information even where taboo subjects are not involved.” While
there is a vast archive available to the historian of science to evaluate Turing’s con-
tributions to mathematics and computer science and newly declassified materials
accessible to the military historian to scrutinize Turing’s work as a cryptographer
at Bletchley Park, evidence concerning his sexuality or possible identification as
a sexual subject is sparse. Hence for historians alarm bells sound when, say, the
British gay lifestyle magazine Attitude (2013) dubs Turing “the gay man who saved
the world,” a characterization of a historical subject wholly the product of memory
rather than history.
Since the 1970s historians have thought long and hard about memory:
as individual memory or personal testimony, as a source of evidence in histori-
cal research, and as group memory. In addressing tough historiographical prob-
lems pertaining to collective memory, many (though by no means all) conclude
that history-­as-­a-­discipline and memory-­as-­collective cannot and should not be
mixed. The historian Jacques Le Goff (1992: 111), for example, regards collective
memory as “essentially mythic, deformed, and anachronistic” and calls on history
to “illuminate memory and help it rectify its errors.” For the trained historian,
the production of collective memory represents an important social process more
closely related to “myth” (Gedi and Elam 1996): it “consists of a host of interlock-
ing practices, many of them continuous or repetitive, some of them subtly transfor-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 122 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

mative of people’s sense of identity” (Cubitt 2007: 19). Collective memory rectifies
past injuries and soothes the pain of past trauma but — like heritage — its creative
acts of remembrance construct the past as a “species of ideological fiction,” and
therefore its operations could not be more distant from the discipline of history
(ibid.: 18).18 Nowhere has this perspective been more strenuously asserted than
in the writings of the French historian Pierre Nora (1989: 8) in which he famously
argues: “Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in
fundamental opposition.” The historian’s task is to produce historical knowledge of
sex and the discourses of sex through explanation, description, analysis, interpre-
tation, or argumentation. The organization of that knowledge as a narrative account
of an event such as the death of Turing might be chronological, but almost no
professional historian today understands history making as linear progression or
believes in material evidence as “objective.”19 Collective memory seeks an affec-
tive connection with a past already known to fulfill political aspirations in the
present, unlike the historian, who hypothesizes what the past might have been like
by investigating the “documentary remains” it “has left us” (Ankersmit 2005: 113).
The historian of sexuality interested in accounting for broader shifts in
social attitudes toward the regulation and “treatment” of same-­sex acts in the post-
war era might begin by asking to what extent Turing’s case was typical or unusual
in the early 1950s, when prosecution rates for gross indecency had never been
higher, even as more tolerant views were beginning to emerge. 20 Investigation of
the lives of men attracted to other men, or older men attracted to younger men,
or upper-­middle-­class men attracted to working-­class men, allows the historian
to correct memory’s errors by putting Turing’s punishment into a wider historical
context. For example, collective memory demonizes organotherapy, but what is now
termed “chemical castration” held different meanings in 1952. 21 Turing’s legal
representative argued it was in the “public interest” to spare a man as gifted as
Turing a prison sentence (Hodges [1983] 1987: 472). 22 Thinking about Turing
as “gay” or his treatment as “homophobic” — words not commonly used or even
invented until the late 1960s — renders the past intelligible for groups today at
the expense of understanding Turing’s way of being in the world. Strictly speak-
ing, Turing was not punished because he was a male homosexual: the Labouch-
ere Amendment outlawed sexual acts between men. The now-­naturalized habit of
identifying as a sexual “something” was still evolving unevenly during the 1940s
and 1950s, and men could pursue pleasure without seeing themselves as possess-
ing an identity.23 Nonetheless, collective memory demands a conviction for “homo-
sexuality,” just as his “subsequent suicide in 1954” offers “a rare window into the

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 QUEER HISTORY / QUEER MEMORY 123

lives of gay people living in a time when homosexuality was both illegal and taboo”
(Pichorowycz 2013).
At the same time, collective memory does not purely fabricate, as seen in
its selective use of approved biographers to confirm and consolidate group identity.
In one online LGBT History Month commentary, for instance, Hodges’s biography
is judged a “classic,” while another is swiftly relegated to the sidelines: “Although
there has been some recent contention, notably stimulated by Jack Copeland, who
is a skeptic about the official explanation of the man’s death, there is a common
consensus that Alan Turing committed suicide” (Pichorowycz 2013). Collective
memory requires Turing’s personal suffering at the hands of the state to have been
the cause of suicide through asphyxia rather than, as his mother and Copeland
maintained, a tragic accident. Group memory fuels political aspirations, but it
struggles to account for incongruities and conundrums that do not fit its needs.
For instance, Turing’s colleagues would many years later recollect a man with a
mordant sense of humor, who responded to the forced feminization of his body
“with giggles” and carried documents pertaining to his court case in a file headed
“Burglary & Buggery.”24 What erotic pleasures Turing enjoyed or sexual acts he
performed can only be imagined in a man whose playful expressions resist fixity.
Yet in the context of memory, quirkiness and eccentricity become a cover to hide
shame, trauma, and pain, fixing the commemorated object in ways that mythologize
and inspire. Because the “elevation of memory to the status of a historical agent”
glosses over contradictions or ignores historical details, it represents a dangerous
combination of literary imagination, desire, and politics that could not be more
out of step with history’s interests, methods, and logics (Klein 2000: 136). The
historian considers all the possibilities, including whether, as has been speculated,
Turing was the victim of murder by British or American intelligence agencies who,
at a time of communist paranoia, saw his “deviant” sexuality as a threat to national
security. 25 While the social historian delves into the archive to find queer lives
that seem familiar (or different) to us, the critical historian is alert to the unex-
pected, startling, even shocking in a radically alien past, interrogating sex and the
discourses of sex in circulation at the middle of the last century. For the critical
historian, the very irresolvability of the mysteries surrounding Turing’s final hours
might be what is most interesting. All historians look to the archive for the raw
material of historical analysis, but the critical historian takes nothing about the
past for granted in considering the ways Turing’s sexual self-­understanding shifted
over the years of his short life, if he thought about himself this way at all.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 124 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

A Man of His Type

The rubric of “queer temporalities” encompasses a diverse range of practices:

“some chart nostalgia’s backward-­looking melancholy; some trace temporality’s
effects in and as the present; and some celebrate the sheer queerness of nonpro-
gressive time” (Freccero 2013: 781 – 82).26 Open to the plurality of the present, all
permutations of queer temporalities investigate “the recursive eddies and back-­
to-­the-­future loops that often pass undetected or uncherished beneath the official
narrations of the linear sequence that is taken to structure normative life” (Jagose
2009: 158). Consensus begins to unravel when questions pertaining to history
or historicism enter the frame. For queer historicists — that is, the historically
minded literary and cultural critic with an “overwhelming desire to feel histori-
cal” (Nealon 2001: 8) — attentiveness to shared memories, backwardness, anach-
ronism, asynchronicities, nostalgia, and untimeliness demonstrates the “powerful
social and political potential” (Dinshaw et al. 2007: 191) of “becoming-­collective-­
across-­time” (Freeman 2010: 11). From the vantage point of the historian, these
critical transactions more closely resemble the affective dynamics of a collective
memory experience open to pastness as “recursive or even repetitive” (Freccero
2013: 781). Professional historians, too, recognize how “we feel about the past is
no less important than what we know about it” but nevertheless, as I have shown,
approach memory with caution (Ankersmit 2005: 10).27 Queer scholars committed
to “historical writing” believe that the “restless ghosts” who haunt “the present
can be the means of calling for justice for past exclusions and injustice” (Dinshaw
2012: 34). The highly acclaimed social historian and postcolonial critic Dipesh
Chakrabarty, for example, whose work is often cited approvingly by queer his-
toricists such as Carolyn Dinshaw and Elizabeth Freeman, calls for a poetic and
political engagement with the past for the marginalized.28 Differentiating between
“historical truths” (or what historians understand as the discipline of history) and
“historical wounds” (a mixture of memory and history), Chakrabarty (2007: 77, 78,
83) envisages a hybrid historiography to assist groups who have suffered trauma to
feel connected to the past, though such forms of historicization entail risk: blurring
“memory and history,” he observes, produces both “benign and malignant” effects.
This danger is clearly illustrated by a comment in the coroner’s report on
the cause of Turing’s death. According to reports in the national press, the coroner
stated: “I am forced to the conclusion that this was a deliberate act. In a man of
his type, one never knows what his mental processes are going to do next” (Daily
Telegraph and Morning Post, June 11, 1954). 29 We will never know what was
meant in describing Turing as a “type,” perhaps a reference to his genius, class

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 QUEER HISTORY / QUEER MEMORY 125

background, work as an academic, or sexual identity. However, in basing a verdict

on what the coroner thought he knew already — the modus operandi of collective
memory and historicist approaches to queer temporalities — he ceased to look at
all the available evidence at hand, and, consequently, other possible explanations
were closed down. Any mode of pastness that represents a past event “to affirm
its communality and commonality” takes a similar risk (Megill 2007: 30). The
queer “turn toward time” — like collective memory and commemoration — “creates
new forms of sociality, new modes of interconnection,” but constructing the past in
this way assumes “a certain consistent selfsameness” (Dinshaw et al. 2007: 177;
Casey 2007: 251, 256). This means that potential gains must be carefully weighed
against the loss of other plausible historical explanations. Producing narratives of
pastness as “something willed in the present” puts temporal and historical differ-
ence in the service of the excluded, but the past-­as-­recollected will always tell us
more about the present, the act of recollection denoting an encounter with a past
already known (Megill 2007: 30).30 Just as the temporal disorderings of commem-
oration allow LGBT and/or queer-­identified people to forge a remembered past
that trumps history to ensure “continuity between past and present and a feeling
of belonging,” so too do the operations of queer historicism strengthen queerness
across time (Ricoeur 2006: 14).31
Like the historicists, queer unhistoricists envisage time as “cyclical, inter-
rupted, multi-­layered, reversible, stalled” but search for alternatives by construct-
ing “history” as a discipline unchanged since the nineteenth century (Dinshaw et
al. 2007: 186 – 87). Carla Freccero (2007: 488), for example, links historicism with
an “empirical history” trapped by “periodization,” a critique that clears the way
for her call for a “ ‘fantasmatic’ historiography as a way to get at how subjects live,
not only their histories, but history itself, to the extent that history is lived through
fantasy in the form of ideology,” or more specifically a teleologically driven histori-
cism. Mistaking the timely maneuvers of historicist practices as part and parcel of
academic history, unhistoricists fail to spot a strand of history making as equally
committed to the potential of an indeterminate past and as fully accepting of the
constructed nature of all historical narratives, namely, critical history. For unhis-
toricists and critical historians alike, historicist work violates a “basic principle of
modern historiography,” that is, “the disappearance of the past from the present,
its movement from visibility to invisibility” (Spiegel 2009: 4). Yet queer unhis-
toricist commitments to sustaining “risky intersubjective collectivity” reveal queer
unhistoricism as a project divided against itself: like collective memory and queer
historicism, it too — in ways no less ideological — expresses “hopes and wishes”
of collectivity, but, like critical history, it dreams of “other ways to be, to live, and

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 126 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

to fashion worlds” outside the “vagaries of identity and identification” (Freccero

2007: 492, 490). Duly observing the conflicting imperatives of collective mem-
ory, historicism, and critical history, queer unhistoricism recognizes the “force of
affect” in “archival and memorializing projects” while drawing a line “between
what is dead (past) and what is not” (Spiegel 2009: 4).
That unhistoricists have been slow in recognizing potential affinities with
critical history suggests another hidden cost in positioning practices as opposi-
tional. At present, queering time — whether as a historicist or unhistoricist — 
represents navigations of pastness that could not be more different than a criti-
cal history practice interested in producing “something that doesn’t yet exist and
of which we can have no idea of what it will be” (Foucault 2001: 893).32 How
then must we make sense of methodological and ideological divergences and con-
vergences if not in terms of polarization? If queer historicism deploys the back-
ward glance to trace patterns and cycles, and queer unhistoricism traces “ghostly
returns suffused with affective materiality” to help in processing “trauma” and
“mourning” across time, must we simply understand these practices as fundamen-
tally antithetical (Freccero 2007: 489)? Yes and no. Coming to terms with the dis-
tinctive logics, protocols, and objectives of each practice entails identifying crucial
differences in modes of historical knowing as diametrically opposed while also
accepting their entanglements and commonalities. And so narratives of Alan Tur-
ing endlessly circulate and recirculate in the historical present, as proponents of
rival practices simultaneously and variously construct him as a hero or icon of col-
lective memory, a biographical figure, a case study for the LGBT scholar or social
historian, an individual who binds queer collectivities across time, and a brilliant
thinker whose queerness makes little sense now.

Iekyf Rqmsi Adxuo Kvkzc Gubj

Memory’s identification of Turing as gay or a born homosexual translates what

is unknowable, incoherent, or illegible into categories we understand now. This
important function notwithstanding, tensions between history and memory persist:
using the past to make “affective narratives of human belonging” (Chakrabarty
2008: 71), historians argue, often entails skewing the facts, flattening complexi-
ties, or advancing claims that are “only possibly true” and therefore untrustworthy
(Megill 2007: 58). In this way, irreconcilable differences emerge as the only con-
stant in the fraught relations between academic history and collective memory
practices. Within queer temporalities an uncannily similar divide seems to have
emerged, as literary scholars orient their interventions for or against history or his-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 QUEER HISTORY / QUEER MEMORY 127

toricism. Queer historicists turn to the historical past to discern “how categories,
however mythic, phantasmic, and incoherent, came to be” (Traub 2013: 35), while
queer unhistoricists understand their engagements with temporality as “precisely
not history” (Freccero 2013: 781). As with the history-­versus-­memory debates,
however, these skirmishes need not lead necessarily to an unproductive stalemate.
Oppositionality intensifies our awareness of what each modality achieves
or, conversely, cannot achieve, its explanatory power useful and troubling. Prac-
titioners fight their corner, but no degree of persuasion succeeds in resolving the
sticking points: memory’s selective use of evidence will always strike the histo-
rian as self-­serving, and the historian’s nonnegotiable demand for proof will always
strike the unhistoricist as untenable. The critical historian’s unshakable belief that
“each historical fact” occurs “only once, and will occur only once,” will inevi-
tably be at odds with genealogical narratives that require time to be cyclical or
recursive (Le Goff 1992: 115). At the same time, there are risks in overstating as
discrete how diverse pathways work in practice, their methodological borrowings
sometimes creating impure hybrid historiographies that flout the rules of engage-
ment.33 As the stuff of historical investigation and collective memory, the deposi-
tions presented at Turing’s inquest do not relate the truth of a historical event but
present an opportunity for history or memory to frame different stories about a
famous mathematician as a victim of suicide, accidental death, or murder. Lost in
the forceful polemics of queer historicists and unhistoricists is their mutual inter-
est in a queer genealogy that resonates “loudly and across . . . many centuries”
(Dinshaw et al. 2007: 187), their common pursuit rendering the “object of study”
as “the political referent it stands for” (Wiegman 2012: 37). Using the case of Tur-
ing to unpick the oppositional logic that sets history against memory, or historicism
against unhistoricism, reveals the paralyzing effects of polarization but also, and
perhaps more urgently, the paramount importance in forging any number of path-
ways in creating queer narratives of pastness, including the unmaking of history.
Returning to the Alan Turing Memorial — a site of public mourning and
celebration — there are signs of the familiar and enigmatic. Embossed on the rungs
of the bench behind the seated figure we see facts beyond dispute (Turing’s name
and the dates of his birth and death) as well as a mysterious twenty-­four-­letter
cipher: IEKYF RQMSI ADXUO KVKZC GUBJ (fig. 2). When asked about the
meaning of the cipher, the sculptor explained that it once said “something,” but he
no longer remembers “what or where or when or why or how”: its code correlates to
“some particular place on some particular day with a particular type of machine,
the place and type having some special significance, like, Alan’s birthday or
something.”34 If memory’s impulse is to translate the sequence into the vernacular

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 128 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Figure 2. A detail of the Alan Turing

Memorial showing the twenty-four letter
cipher, Sackville Park, Manchester,
2001, Glyn Hughes, sculptor. Author
photo.

so that we read feelingly through the senses — “the gay victim of homophobia” or

“the queer genius whose suffering haunts us across time” — critical history regards
the sequence as untranslatable in terms we understand now. Memory rewards the
onlooker who seeks a mystical connection with the past, while the critical historian
finds “happiness” in acknowledging the “irreducibility” of then and now, the past
as “peculiar” and “foreign” (Ricoeur 2004: 10). The urge to translate in terms
of the present jostles alongside the willingness to navigate an unknowable past,
differences at once unavoidable and irresolvable. Accounting for the messiness and
complexity of our movements through the labyrinth of history and memory calls for
recognizing the boundaries of praxis as delineated and mutable, conflicting and
intertwined.

Notes

1. A typescript copy (pages unnumbered) of Clayton’s deposition can be found in the

papers of Alan Mathison Turing (n.d.), King’s/PP/AMT/K/6, at King’s College Archive
Center, Cambridge. This document and other materials relating to the inquest are also
available online through the Turing Digital Archive.
2. These phrases appear in the deposition made by Leonard Cottrell, a sergeant in the
Cheshire Constabulary, Wilmslow (pages unnumbered); see Turing (n.d.), King’s/PP/
AMT/K/6.
3. The idea of “collective memory” was first developed in 1925 by the French sociologist
Maurice Halbwachs. While I understand “collective memory” as the common memory
of groups, there are multiple definitions; see Halbwachs 1992. The historian Harold
Marcuse (2007) has compiled a list of the many meanings of collective memory on his
website.
4. See the entry on Turing under the heading “Science” in “Biographies of Famous
LGBT People” (LGBT History Month n.d.).

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 QUEER HISTORY / QUEER MEMORY 129

5. This well-­known phrase was devised by Pierre Nora in his seminal essay “Between
Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire” (1989). For a concise overview of histori-
ans’ difficulties with collective memory, see the editors’ introduction to The Collective
Memory Reader (Olick, Vinitzky-­Seroussi, and Levy 2011: 3 – 62). See also Tumblety
2013.
6. The historian Kerwin Klein (2000: 128) writes: “History, as with other key words,
finds its meanings in large part through its counter-­concepts and synonyms, and so
the emergence of memory promises to rework history’s boundaries. . . . Much current
historiography pits memory against history.”
7. Sam McBean (2013), for instance, presents queering time as a “mode of doing his-
tory.” Jack Halberstam (2013), on the other hand, seeks to distance queer work
from academic history.
8. For an extended discussion of disciplinarity in the context of LGBT and queer history,
see Doan 2013. In short, a literary scholar turns to the past to better understand a
text, while the historian turns to the past to provide historical understanding.
9. To address questions relating to queer navigations of history and memory, I restrict
my discussion of queer temporalities to debates between practitioners who understand
their work as historical writing or as an alternative to historical writing. Representa-
tive interventions in literary and cultural criticism include (in chronological order):
Nealon 2001, Jagose 2002, Cvetkovich 2003, Edelman 2004, Halberstam 2005,
Freccero 2006, Love 2007, Luciano 2007, Muñoz 2009, Rohy 2009, Stockton 2009,
Freeman 2010, Dinshaw 2012, Coviello 2013, and Traub 2015.
10. I am less interested in dissecting the crux of these differences in queer approaches
to temporality than assessing the consequences of oppositionality. An early sustained
discussion of queer historicism appears in McCabe 2005. For a good introduction to
scholarly engagements with temporality from a philosophical or psychoanalytic per-
spective, see Grosz 1999.
11. For a lucid introduction of this aspect of Turing’s work, see Mackenzie 1996. Tur-
ing’s many contributions to mathematics, cryptography, and computer science have
not escaped queer analysis. See, for instance, Wilson 2010 for an excellent and deeply
researched chapter on Turing. I am grateful also to Homay King (n.d.), who kindly
shared her work in progress on Turing, an essay that makes good use of Bergsonian
theories of time.
12. For further information on the campaign calling for a government pardon, see Davies
2013.
13. These documents are available at www.turingarchive.org/browse.php/K/6.
14. For a report on the royal pardon, see Davies 2013.
15. See the Lesbian and Gay Foundation 2012 and Dimock 2012. Leavitt (2006: 7)
brands Turing a “martyr to English intolerance.” During Manchester Pride Week in
August 2014, the artist Paul Harfleet created an art installation called “Byte” at the

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 130 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Turing Memorial, distributing “subtly augmented apples to passersby.” The purpose

of this “performance action” was to raise awareness of the apple’s significance to Tur-
ing and “the symbolism of the apple throughout history” (Harfleet 2014).
16. According to Hodges ([1983] 1987: 457), Turing’s five-­page statement was in the
Cheshire Record Office. Unfortunately, this important document seems to have been
culled (Cheshire Record Office, pers. comm., July 30, 2014).
17. Turing to Norman Routledge (undated; a penciled note reads: “mid-­Feb 1952?”), in
Turing (n.d.), King’s/PP/AMT/D/14a, King’s College Archive Center, Cambridge.
18. David Lowenthal (1998: 121) writes: “History seeks to convince by truth,” while
“heritage exaggerates and omits, candidly invents and frankly forgets, and thrives on
ignorance and error.”
19. I wish to thank the historian Anna Clark (pers. comm., January 28, 2014) for this
explanation. Gabrielle Spiegel, in a presidential address to the American Historical
Association, also confirms these points. On the subject of historical writing as endors-
ing a progressive or developmental view of the past, Spiegel (2009: 8) writes: “The
emergence of poststructuralism under the sign of the linguistic turn bespoke the end
of the confident, optimistic era of European Enlightenment with its faith in the con-
tinual progress of human history under the aegis of scientific learning and methods
and, not least among them, scientific history.” Earlier in the address, she observes:
“The idea of an objective universe existing independently of speech and universally
comprehensible . . . is an illusion” (ibid.: 1). Note also Dinshaw’s (2012: 18) observa-
tion: “No historian believes that time moves punctually forward . . . emptily, evenly,
and always progressively toward a single goal.”
20. In 1957 The Report of the Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prosti-
tution tracked the “number of homosexual offences known to the police: 320 in 1938;
1686 in 1952; 2322 in 1955” (Hall Williams 1960: 359).
21. Chris Waters, pers. comm., July 1, 2014. Waters’s explanation of Turing’s “punish-
ment” is based on new research he has undertaken at the Cheshire Record Office; see
Waters n.d.
22. The judge gave Turing the choice of prison or probation on condition that he undergo
one year of organotherapy.
23. For a discussion of men’s sexuality at this time, see Houlbrook 2005.
24. These recollections of Turing’s former colleagues are mentioned in The Strange Life
and Death of Dr. Turing (1992). Elizabeth Wilson (2010: 38) also cites these exam-
ples in her call for more-­nuanced readings of a past figure as other than “Other”: “It
seems to me,” she writes, “that declarations like this need to take into account the
ways in which Turing’s secret was an open, enjoyable one.”
25. The human rights advocate Peter Tatchell (2013) has called on the British govern-
ment to investigate the possibility that Turing was murdered by the security services.
Leavitt (2006: 278) suggests that Turing’s suicide could have been “staged” because
he “knew too much.”

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 QUEER HISTORY / QUEER MEMORY 131

26. The early modernists Traub groups under the heading “unhistoricist” would not use
this term to describe their own practices; indeed, Freccero (2013: 782) insists that
her critique was not directed toward “historicizing” per se but to historical work that
promotes “progressivist and potentially Eurocentric models of historical change and
identity . . . because they are ideological.”
27. Jacques Le Goff (1992: xii) argues that “to privilege memory excessively is to sink
into the unconquerable flow of time.” Dinshaw et al. (2007: 190) also highlights the
political risks in “the felt experience of asynchrony.”
28. For examples of Chakrabarty’s influence on the queer theorization of time, see Din-
shaw 2012, Freeman 2010, and Love 2007.
29. This version of the coroner’s verdict was published in the Daily Telegraph and Morn-
ing Post on June 11, 1954. Slightly differing wording appeared in the Manchester
Guardian, also on June 11.
30. Paul Ricoeur (2006: 14) argues that recollection, “with its necessary phase of dis-
tancing and objectification, can contribute to the interrogating of history.”
31. In this passage Ricoeur draws on Koselleck 2004.
32. Also cited in Scott 2007.
33. For an important example of historiographical hybridity in which the methods of criti-
cal history meld with those historians often ascribe to collective memory, see Molly
McGarry’s account of Spiritualism in nineteenth-­century America. Writing as a crit-
ical historian, McGarry (2012: 8) explains how this movement “did not decline so
much as become illegible.” Hence, historical explanation relies not on the traceability
of continuities or discontinuities from what is already known but on coming to terms
with a cultural formation no longer known. Yet for McGarry, history and memory are
not antithetical. Her willingness to probe how historical subjects longed for “affective
connection across time” in attempting to communicate with the dead points also to an
acceptance of the need for recognizability, and thus an engagement with pastness that
historians associate with memory (ibid.). Drawing on the arguments of the sociologist
Avery Gordon, McGarry calls for “taking the lived experience of being haunted seri-
ously” to reach “historical appreciation” of a different way of knowing the past (ibid.).
34. The blogger Ben O’Steen (2010) reports these comments from an e-­mail exchange
he claims to have had with the industrial sculptor Glyn Hughes, who created the
Alan Turing Memorial. Hughes confirmed the accuracy of his statement with me in
an e-­mail: “The inscription on the bench is meant to be important. It is a phrase of
significance, coded using a virtual computer version of a particular type of Enigma
machine with the wheels set to some place and date which was significant — might
have been Turing’s birthday. Trouble is, I really can’t remember. It isn’t that I’m trying
to create a nice puzzle . . . but just that I went through so, so many permutations before
choosing the ideal one that I’ve quite forgotten which one it was” (Glyn Hughes, pers.
comm., June 23, 2014). The author wishes to thank Glyn for his support.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 132 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

References

Ankersmit, Frank. 2005. Sublime Historical Experience. Stanford: Stanford University

Press.
Attitude Magazine. 2013. November 2. London: Attitude Media.
BBC News. 2012. “Alan Turing Anti-­homophobia Award Launched in Manchester.” June
22. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-­england-­manchester-­18549186.
Breaking the Code. 1997. Dir. Herbert Wise. London: BBC, The Drama House, WGBH.
Casey, Edward S. 2000. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. 2nd ed. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2007. “History and the Politics of Recognition.” In Manifestos for
History, edited by Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow, 77 – 87. London:
Routledge.
——— . 2008. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Codebreaker. 2011. Dir. Clare Beavan. London: Channel 4.
Copeland, B. Jack. 2012. Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Coviello, Peter. 2013. Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-­Century
America. New York: New York University Press.
Cubitt, Geoffrey. 2007. History and Memory. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Public Cultures.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Daily Telegraph. 1954. June 11.
Davies, Caroline. 2013. “Enigma Codebreaker Alan Turing Receives Royal Pardon.”
The Guardian, December 23. www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/24/enigma
-­codebreaker-­alan-­turing-­royal-­pardon.
Dimock, Chase. 2012. “Saint Turing: A Few Reflections on Gay Iconography and Martyr-
dom on the Occasion of Alan Turing’s One Hundredth Birthday.” Qouch, June 23.
theqouch.com/2012/06/23/saint-­turing-­a-­few-­reflections-­on-­gay-­iconography-­and
-­martyrdom-­on-­the-­occasion-­of-­alan-­turings-­100th-­birthday/.
Dinshaw, Carolyn . 2012. How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the
Queerness of Time. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Dinshaw, Carolyn, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Free-
man, Judith Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Christopher Nealon, and Nguyen Tan
Hoang. 2007. “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion.” GLQ 13,
nos. 2 – 3: 177 – 95.
Doan, Laura. 2013. “An Uncommon Project: The Discipline Problem Reconsidered.” In
Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War,
27 – 57. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 QUEER HISTORY / QUEER MEMORY 133

Dowd, Vincent. 2014. “What Was Alan Turing Really Like?” BBC News Magazine, June
6. www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-­27701207.
Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 2001. “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” (“Interview with Michel Fou-
cault”). In Dits et écrits II, 1976 – 1988, 893 – 98. Paris: Gallimard.
Freccero, Carla. 2006. Queer/Early/Modern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
——— . 2007. “Queer Times.” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3: 485 – 94.
——— . 2013. “Letter to the Editor.” PMLA 128, no. 3: 781 – 82.
Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Gedi, Noa, and Yigal Elam. 1996. “Collective Memory — What Is It?” History and Mem-
ory 8, no. 1: 30 – 50.
Gottfried, Ted. 1996. Alan Turing: The Architect of the Computer Age. New York: Franklin
Watts.
Grosz, Elizabeth, ed. 1999. Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Halberstam, Jack. 2013. “Game of Thrones: The Queer Season.” April 8. bullybloggers
.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/game-­of-­thrones-­the-­queer-­season-­by-­jack
-­halberstam-­house-­of-­nemo/.
Halberstam, Judith. 1991. “Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the
Intelligent Machine.” Feminist Studies 17, no. 3: 439 – 60.
——— . 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New
York: New York University Press.
Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hall Williams, J. E. 1960. “Sex Offences: The British Experience.” Law and Contempo-
rary Problems 25, no. 2: 334 – 58.
Hodges, Andrew. [1983] 1987. Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence. London: Unwin.
——— . n.d. “Turing, Alan Mathison (1912 – 1954).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biog-
raphy Online. www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36578 (accessed February 3, 2016).
Houlbrook, Matt. 2005. Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis,
1918 – 1957. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The Imitation Game. 2014. Dir. Morten Tyldum. UK: Black Bear Pictures, Bristol
Automotive.
Jagose, Annamarie. 2002. Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual
Sequence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
——— . 2009. “Feminism’s Queer Theory.” Feminism and Psychology 19, no. 2: 157 – 74.
King, Homay. n.d. “Virtual Memory: Time-­Based Art and the Cartesian Dream of the
Digital,” unpublished paper.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 134 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Klein, Kerwin Lee. 2000. “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse.” Repre-
sentations 69: 127 – 50.
Koselleck, Reinhart. 2004. “ ‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation.’ ” In
Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, 255 – 75. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Leavitt, David. 2006. The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of
the Computer. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Le Goff, Jacques. 1992. History and Memory. Translated by Steven Rendall and Elizabeth
Claman. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lévy-­Bruhl, Lucien. 1966. How the Natives Think. New York: Washington Square.
LGBT History Month. n.d. “Alan Turing (1912 – 1954).” www.lgbthistorymonth.org.uk
/history/alanturing.htm (accessed February 3, 2016).
Lesbian and Gay Foundation. 2012. “The Alan Turing Memorial Award,” June 18, 2012.
lgbt.foundation/news-­articles/alan-­turing-­a-­homo-­hero/.
Love, Heather. 2007. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lowenthal, David. 1998. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Luciano, Dana. 2007. Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-­Century
America. New York: New York University Press.
Mackenzie, Adrian. 1996. “Undecidability: The History and Time of the Universal Turing
Machine.” Configurations 4, no. 3: 359 – 79.
Manchester Pride. 2014. August 2, 2014. www.manchesterpride.com/whatson
/artiststalkpaul.
Marcuse, Harold. 2007. Collective Memory: Definitions. www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty
/marcuse/classes/201/CollectiveMemoryDefinitions.htm.
McBean, Sam. 2013. “Being ‘There’: Digital Archives and Queer Affect.” June 11.
www.photomediationsmachine.net/2013/06/11/being-­there-­digital-­archives-­and
-­queer-­affect/.
McCabe, Susan. 2005. “To Be and to Have: The Rise of Queer Historicism.” GLQ 11, no.
1: 119 – 34.
McGarry, Molly. 2012. Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of
Nineteenth-­Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Megill, Allan. 2007. Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to
Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Morning Post. 1954. June 11.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New
York: New York University Press.
Munslow, Alun. 2012. A History of History. London: Routledge.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 QUEER HISTORY / QUEER MEMORY 135

Nealon, Christopher. 2001. Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stone-
wall. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representa-
tions 26: 7 – 24.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 2013. Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Olick, Jeffrey K., Vered Vinitzky-­Seroussi, and Daniel Levy, eds. 2011. The Collective
Memory Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
O’Steen, Ben. 2010. “What Does the Code on the Alan Turing Memorial Actually Say?”
September 23. benosteen.wordpress.com/2010/09/23/what-­does-­the-­code-­on-­the
-­alan-­turing-­memorial-­actually-­say/.
Pichorowycz, Gregory. 2013. “Alan Turing and Hidden Stories.” Canvas, February 21.
canvas.union.shef.ac.uk/wordpress/?p=1742.
Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. On Translation. Translated by Eileen Brennan. London: Routledge.
——— . 2006. “Memory — Forgetting — History.” In Meaning and Representation in His-
tory, 9 – 19. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Rohy, Valerie. 2009. Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
Scott, Joan. 2007. “History-­Writing as Critique.” In Manifestos for History, 19 – 38. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Spiegel, Gabrielle M. 2009. “The Task of the Historian.” American Historical Review 114,
no. 2: 1 – 15.
Stockton, Kathryn Bond. 2009. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth
Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
The Strange Life and Death of Dr. Turing. 1992. Dir. Christopher Sykes. London, UK:
Christopher Sykes Productions.
Tatchell, Peter. 2013. “Alan Turing: Was He Murdered by the Security Services?” Peter
Tatchell Foundation. www.petertatchellfoundation.org/lgbt-­community/alan-­turing
-­was-­he-­murdered-­security-­services.
Traub, Valerie. 2013. “The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies.” PMLA 128, no. 1: 21 – 39.
——— . 2015. Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press.
Tumblety, Joan, ed. 2013. Memory and History: Understanding Memory as Source and
Subject. London: Routledge.
Turing, Alan Mathison. n.d. Papers. King’s College Archive Center, Cambridge. www
.turingarchive.org (accessed February 3, 2016).
Turing, Sara. [1959]. 2012. Alan M. Turing: Centenary Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Waters, Chris. n.d. “Queer in the ‘Fifties: Three Lives.” Unpublished paper.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user
 136 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

White, Hayden. 2007. “Afterword: Manifesto Time.” Manifestos for History. London:
Routledge.
Whitemore, Hugh. 1997. Breaking the Code. Oxford: Amber Lane.
Wiegman, Robyn. 2012. Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Wilson, Elizabeth. 2010. “The Positive Affects of Alan Turing.” In Affect and Artificial
Intelligence, 32 – 56. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/23/1/113/415392/GLQ231_05Doan_FF.pdf

by University of Manchester user