[SIGCIS-Members] Alan Turing as gay icon

Thu Jun 5 12:53:40 PDT 2014

Also at least one reference to Walter Pitts' sexuality is from Elizabeth
Wilson's fantastic *Affect and Artificial Intelligence* (2010) where she
describes the homosocial environment of early cybernetics researchers and
suggests that Wiener broke off relations with Pitts in part due to
accusations of homosexuality. It's actually a fantastic part of the book
that revolves around the famous anecdote of Pitts meeting Bertrand Russell
in a park in 1938:

Rook McCulloch (Warren's widow and editor of his collected works) appears
> to have removed a part of this story that veers too close to manifest
> homosexuality. A copy-edited typescript of Blum's story reads as follows:
> “Walter was just 15 when he ran away from home, turned up in Chicago and
> there, in a park, made friends with a fellow who called himself Bert."
> Blum's original phrase "in a park…" has been deleted by hand. In another
> version of the same manuscript, the word "park" is deleted and the
> suggestion "small restaurant" is inserted (see Appendixes 2 and 3). The
> final published version of the story, as we have seen, alludes to no
> particular location at all. As if the meeting of these mathematical minds
> was untouched by geographical orientation, and, in particular, that it was
> unsullied by the class, sexual and gendered implications that meetings
> between men in public parks entail. This act of editing does not just erase
> any sexual frisson that may or may not have been part of this encounter, it
> also desexualizes the conceptual schemata that these men (Pitts, Russell,
> Carnap, Rashevsky, Lettvin, McCulloch) would build. It straightens out, and
> forswears, the longing that motivates AI. To be perfectly clear: I am, not
> making claims about actual homosexual encounters. Nor am I trying to build
> a case that Pitts was homosexual On the contrary, I am arguing that
> attachments cannot be readily contained within the logic of alloerotic
> object choice that dominated the twentieth century. Smalheiser (2000)
> reports that: "his friends are emphatic that Pitts was neither asexual nor
> homosexual [yet] there is no record of him actually having any romantic
> relationships with women. A shy, introverted lost soul, with glasses, bad
> teeth, a habit of twirling his hair, a slight nervous tremor and a tendency
> to bump into things, more comfortable with small children than with adults,
> he appealed rather to women's maternal instincts." (221)

Refs:
Wilson, Elizabeth. 2010. *Affect and Artificial Intelligence*. Seattle:
University of Washington Press: 126-127.
Smalheiser, Neil. 2000. Walter Pitts. *Perspectives in Biology and Medicine*
43(2): 217-26.

Apologies for the repeated posting, but this is all very related to my
second research project.

- Jacob

On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 9:17 PM, Jacob Gaboury <jacob.gaboury at nyu.edu> wrote:

> 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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>> _______________________________________________
>> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list
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>
>
>
>

-- 
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/
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