Wait a second, Alan Turing was a queer icon? I had no idea.
I cannot fathom how anyone can allow people to be punished for loving who they love, in a consenting relationship between two adults. What a terrible and tragic story. Fuck anyone who wants to punish people for doing something that doesn’t hurt anyone; for doing something that in fact is literally the direct opposite of hurting anyone. Like, fuck them to the core, and not in any nice way.
Wait a second, Alan Turing was a queer icon?
Yeah. He’s a queer icon, and a god among humans to computer science fans.
It breaks my heart that he didn’t get to see the current era of queer federated computing. If there’s any kind of after-life, Alan has got to be rooting for the Fediverse.
I’m not sure about that (the icon bit). I’ve gay friends who have been surprised that Turing was gay - personally I knew about it since I knew about Turing, but I was a nerd who was interested in the theory of computation. It’s only relative recently (with the popularity of unbelievably lousy character-assassination like “the Imitation Game”*) that he’s been more in the general public eye, I think.
- This is a shit film that represents the worse of pandering, and casts Turing in an appallingly poor light, whilst leaning into the “autistic savant” trope hard. It’s abysmal.
I wouldn’t say that he’s a well-known queer icon, but well-known enough that there’s been an enduring myth that the early Apple icon was a reference to him - the apple with a bite taken out of it and colored like a rainbow. However, the designers have said that they had no idea at the time and it was purely coincidence.