[SIGCIS-Members] Alan Turing as gay icon

Jacob Gaboury jacob.gaboury at nyu.edu
Thu Jun 5 12:17:18 PDT 2014


While Turing's sexuality as something of an open secret is certainly a
complicated issue, there are several historical accounts that suggest he
was very open about his sexuality. I think the clearest and most widely
quoted is from the IEEE <http://computer.org/computer-pioneers/turing.html>

--

In a set of interviews in 1992 with I. Jack Good and Donald Michie,
[Sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation.] both colleagues of
Turing during his Bletchley Park sojourn, I led them to discuss their
knowledge of Turing's homosexuality:

Good: ...when we walked down King's Parade [in 1947] that was the first
time I discovered that he was homosexual. That was when he said that he was
going to Paris to "see a boy." It was obvious that he was admitting or
proclaiming his homosexuality.

Lee: He was very open about it?

Good: Yes, at that time.

Michie: He certainly wasn't during the war, for some of us, including both
of us, were quite unaware.... I took quite seriously his engagement to ...

Good: Joan Clarke?

Lee: Peter Hilton [1991] quotes you, Jack, as saying, 'It was fortunate
that the authorities did not know during the war that Turing was a
homosexual, otherwise the Allies might have lost the war."

Good: Yes.

Michie: Oh but that's absolute nonsense, because Bletchley had some
flamboyant homosexuals--Peter's ideas that security people were down on
homosexuality itself, is absolute nonsense. I can't think how he could
write that. The most flamboyant case was Angus Wilson--he later became a
very successful novelist, and he had a boyfriend called Beverly, and these
two, Angus was about that high [indicating small] with flowing yellow hair
(I remember it went white later) and Beverly (I forget his second name) was
very "weed-like," very tall. They could be seen shambling along the
horizon, a daily sight, as they took their walk around lawns after lunch.

--

It certainly seems anachronistic to ascribe our contemporary definition of
homosexuality as a coherent and fixed identity, but by many accounts he
viewed the trial and arrest with humor and openness, and the letter Bernard
included above might be read in that light.


-- 
Jacob Gaboury
--
Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Visual Culture
Dept. of Cultural Analysis and Theory, Stony Brook University
--
Junior Fellow, MECS Institute for Advanced Study on Media Cultures of
Computer Simulation
Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany (Summer 2014)
--
Staff Writer, Rhizome.org
New Museum for Contemporary Art
--
http://www.jacobgaboury.com/



On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 8:45 PM, <geoghegb at cms.hu-berlin.de> wrote:

> 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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