[SIGCIS-Members] Alan Turing as gay icon

Thu Jun 5 23:27:31 PDT 2014

Jacob: Thank you for introducing the thread of the whole group of folks
(Pitts, Russell, Carnap, Rashevsky, Lettvin, McCulloch) into the
discussion. I am a semi retired practitioner who has a hobby reading in the
history of science including the history of logical positivism and the
history of cybernetics and computers. I have read a bunch on the connection
of Norbert Wiener with Bertrand Russell and Russell with Walter Pitts and
Rudolf Carnap. I also am a bit obsessive about reading the history of the
Macy Conferences. While the issue of various sexual preferences is
interesting, there is also the issue of why neither Turing nor Walter Pitts
have been given adequate credit for their work.

My most interesting original historical research was going into Warren
McCulloch archive papers at the American Philosophical Society (APS)
Library in downtown Philadelphia (where many of Benjamin Franklin's papers
are located) and reading the files on McCulloch and Walter Pitts. The Pitts
paper are in 4 folders in the correspondence section of the McCulloch
archives.  If you have never been to these archives it is a great archives
to go to when visiting Philadelphia as it is only a block from Independence
Hall and the Liberty Bell.

See the following link for the McCulloch archives at APS:
*http://www.amphilsoc.org/mole/view?docId=ead/Mss.B.M139-ead.xml;query=;brand=default
<http://www.amphilsoc.org/mole/view?docId=ead/Mss.B.M139-ead.xml;query=;brand=default>*;

I was trying to trace some of Walter Pitts history and the files in the
McCulloch archives papers on Pitts were quite interesting. There are copies
of the letters that McCulloch sent to various academic scholars asking for
them to write letters of reference for Walter Pitts so that MIT could grant
him a PHD. Even though the McCulloch and Pitts 1943 paper, A logical
calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity, was a very well cited
paper and played a key role in the transition form logical positivism to
cybernetics, Pitts remains a very obscure figure.

What was interesting is that McCulloch sent a letter to Rudolf Carnap at
Carnap's home address in LA after Carnap went to UCLA to teach asking for a
letter of recommendation from Carnap to use to try and get Pitts a PHD from
MIT.  McCulloch also sent letters to a number of others including Margaret
Mead for this purpose. In the letter that McCulloch sent to Carnap,
McCulloch discusses Russell and Carnap's interactions and influences on
Pitts.
Unfortunately just the letters that McCulloch sent out to other academics
to get letters of recommendation for Pitts were in the Pitts archive file
and none of the replies were in that file.  Some publications indicate that
McCulloch got an OK from MIT to grant Pitts a PHD after getting the
recommendation letters back but Pitts would not sign the papers to get the
PHD.

Anyway my larger question which relates to bigger issues in the sociology
of knowledge is why is the transition from logical positivism to
cybernetics and the history of computers via Turing and Pitts, not viewed
as a major success?  Why is logical positivism still evaluated only for
it's contribution to the philosophy of science when it could claim a huge
success in the role that it played in the history of computers and
technology?

>From a practitioners viewpoint, I ask the question: *Will the sociology of
knowledge be forever stuck evaluating logical positivism in the narrow
context of the philosophy of science when its really successful practical
application was in the history of technology?* A history of computers which
ignores and leaves out the history of the contribution of logical
positivism to the history of computers is inadequate. Turing and Pitts role
in this transition represent key pieces and both of their work deserves
more recognition.Of course I do not want to overstate the role that they
played, but credit does need to be given when it is due.

The irony of all this is that even though Pitts is mostly forgotten and
ignored now, his papers and correspondence with McCulloch are stored in the
McCulloch archives at the American Philosophical Society Library near the
Benjamin Franklin archives and a block from Independence Hall and Liberty
Bell.
*Is that a touch of  historical irony? *

Clarence Townsend
Practitioner & Independent Scholar, Eugene OR
Email: clarence1234 at gmail.com

On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 12:53 PM, Jacob Gaboury <jacob.gaboury at nyu.edu>
wrote:

> 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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>>> ___________________________
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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)
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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/
>
> _______________________________________________
> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list
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> http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription
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