[SIGCIS-Members] Alan Turing as gay icon

Thu Jun 5 11:45:24 PDT 2014

Hi Sigcis,

I concur with Paul. Turing's fear of being thought of as a gay man is
alluded to in the letter below, which I've copied and pasted from
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/06/yours-in-distress-alan.html . It
suggests his fear that his  professional credibility would collapse if his
sexual identity became public knowledge. As an aside, I think I read
something in archival correspondences -- maybe among Norbert Wiener and
Warren McCulloch? -- suggesting that suspicions about Walter Pitts' sexual
orientation (among other issues) likewise threatened his employability. In
case I'm confabulating, don't quote me on that though...

Best,
Bernard

Turing wrote the following letter in 1952 to his friend and fellow
mathematician, Norman Routledge, shortly before pleading guilty.

(Source: Alan Turing: The Enigma - The Centenary Edition; Image: Alan
Turing, via.)

My dear Norman,

I don't think I really do know much about jobs, except the one I had
during the war, and that certainly did not involve any travelling. I think
they do take on conscripts. It certainly involved a good deal of hard
thinking, but whether you'd be interested I don't know. Philip Hall was in
the same racket and on the whole, I should say, he didn't care for it.
However I am not at present in a state in which I am able to concentrate
well, for reasons explained in the next paragraph.

I've now got myself into the kind of trouble that I have always considered
to be quite a possibility for me, though I have usually rated it at about
10:1 against. I shall shortly be pleading guilty to a charge of sexual
offences with a young man. The story of how it all came to be found out is
a long and fascinating one, which I shall have to make into a short story
one day, but haven't the time to tell you now. No doubt I shall emerge
from it all a different man, but quite who I've not found out.

Glad you enjoyed broadcast. Jefferson certainly was rather disappointing
though. I'm afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the
future.

Turing believes machines think
Turing lies with men
Therefore machines do not think

Yours in distress,

Alan

Dr. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan
Institut für Kulturwissenschaft
Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
www.bernardg.com

On Jun 5, 2014, at 4:01 PM, Paul N. Edwards wrote:

I expect “openly gay,” with all the implications that phrase carries
today, is an anachronistic label -- not an accurate description of
Turing’s public persona, nor truly of his private one either.

Paul

On Jun 5, 2014, at 0:36 , Thomas Haigh <thaigh at computer.org> wrote:

My initial guess was that this was an anachronism. Hodge's book Alan Turing:
The Enigma appeared in hardcover late 1983, and one might expect it to have
taken a while to spread far into popular awareness or to have its rather
complex narrative reduced to "won World War II." The Turing play "Breaking
the Code" was not written until 1986. That did a huge amount to boost
Turing's public profile, at least in the UK.

However, the Amazon "search inside the book" finds a line of this kind in a
recent reissue of The Normal Heart script and a 2000 volume combining it
with the sequel. It is of course possible that the play was revised from its
original 1985 version, which is not searchable online.

So apparently Kramer was a pioneer in taking the complex portrait of Turing
given in the Hodges biography, which I believe was widely reviewed on its
initial release, and turning it into the slogan that "it was an openly gay
Englishman who was as responsible as any man for winning he Second World
War." Kramer continues, "His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the
Germans' Enigma code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going
to do--and when the war was over he committed suicide he was so hounded for
being gay."

That would be an important passage in a history of Turing in popular memory,
which would be a great dissertation topic for someone.

Tom

-----Original Message-----
From: members-bounces at sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org] On
Behalf Of Janet Abbate
Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2014 4:42 PM
To: sigcis
Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Alan Turing as gay icon

Did anyone catch the shout-out to Alan Turing in the HBO AIDS-themed movie
"The Normal Heart"? The main character rants, "A gay man won World War II!
They should teach that in schools."

I wonder if that was actually the image of Turing in 1985 (when the original
play was written) or something they added later for the movie? (I mean that
he won WWII, not that he was gay.)

Dr. Janet Abbate
Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society Co-director, National
Capital Region STS program Virginia Tech www.sts.vt.edu/ncr
www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055
www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS

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___________________________

Paul N. Edwards
Professor of Information and History, University of Michigan
A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global
Warming (MIT Press, 2010)

Terse replies are deliberate (and better than nothing)

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