Explanation: Alan Turing was a mathematician and computer scientist whose revolutionary work during WW2 helped the British shorten the war considerably by breaking (and thus having access to) Nazi coded messages.
A little over half a decade after the war, a chance break-in at his house led to him accidentally incriminating himself - by admitting to the presence of his boyfriend. This being the 1950s UK, the courts gave him a choice for the horrific crime of homosexuality - chemical castration, or several months in prison. Turing considered that he would not last in prison, and opted for the chemical treatment. Some time later, he bit into an apple laced with cyanide and died, which many consider to be an act of suicide (though it is still disputed, some believe it was genuinely an accident).
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 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.
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.
Apple laced with cyanide is an accident ??
Damm what a wild times. I would though, with my quite non-normal, reasoning capabilities it would have been done intentionally to murder someone…
Poor storage of laboratory chemicals is the alternative explanation. While plausible, suicide seems more likely to my eyes.
The story is at least semi-plausible, but Turing also still had friends in the right places (not enough to dig him out of the hole he got himself into with the local plod*) and there was a strong social taboo around suicide.
(* At the time there was good reason to believe that the end of the outlawing of homosexuality was just around the corner, so offering a genuine explanation was not necessarily Turing acting as such a naif as is often portrayed.)
“Almost singlehandedly” is way off the mark. Welchman, Tutte - the place was filled with eccentric geniuses; it was the success of management as much as the individual that Bletchley saw so much success.
(“The story of Hut 6” is a good read on the subject. What comes across was that success was down to serendipity as well as hard work, and some remarkably enlightened leadership.)
It’s worth mentioning that German cryptologists had some considerable success cracking British codes as well, notably including the cyphers the Admiralty used to communicate with merchant ships in convoys during the first half of the war. This was a major factor behind Britain nearly losing the Battle of the Atlantic before they even had a chance to participate in the re-invasion of continental Europe in 1944.
Not to disregard Turing here as I believe he is still one of the greats of computing, but the idea that he “Almost Singlehandedly” did anything is to the discredit of the thousands of workers at Bletchley Park alongside him, and the Polish cryptographers who initially cracked several versions of Enigma in the 1930s and went on to teach the Bletchley how they did it.
Turing aside, the world simply treated gay people horribly altogether.
Gay men were victims of the holocaust much like many other groups but Germany wouldn’t recognize this until 4 decades later in the 1980s. We know what the British did to Turing but the U.S. acted similarly due to the Lavender Scare which compared gay people to communists and enacted its own witch hunts for them.
I remember reading somewhere that upon liberation from concentration camps, many gay individuals were simply transferred to prisons from their home country for the crime of being gay. The Nazis were terrifyingly effective in branding exactly what kind of “undesirable” you were:
Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badge
im sorry asocial? What the fuck does this mean in the context of the nazis? Were people who didn’t actively socialize considered a threat somehow?
Asocial was a very broad term - anyone they thought was not sufficiently contributing to society, essentially.
That’s why I always feel a little sad whenever he comes up in conversation. He could’ve done more cool shit.
Can we stop the false notion that he did it on his own? It’s just not true. Not even close.
Arne Beurling however DID single-handedly Crack a T52 in 2 weeks with nothing but pen and paper.
He was undeniably brilliant, and was instrumental in both the development of the Bombe (which broke the Enigma code), and the programming of Colossus (which broke… the other code the Germans used of which I can’t remember the name). Plus he was instrumental in the first steps of both computer science in general and artifical intelligence in particular. He deserves the plaudits.
But so do a lot of other people who worked at Bletchly park (if you get the chance, go there, it’s great) and elsewhere.
He sure was brilliant. And what was done to him is from today’s standpoint barbaric, but the notion that he alone was responsible for breaking the codes is a terrible falsehood that needs to die.
I think we can celebrate his brilliancy without discrediting everyone else that worked on the project. There’s just no need to add lies such as “single handedly”.
He was singularly brilliant in coming up with the Turing Machine and contributing towards the Church Turing Thesis which are the foundations of all computer science. It is true that he did not crack enigma by himself but his scientific contributions shouldn’t be understated.
without alan turing the modern era would not be the way it is. In the same way that without tesla the modern electrical grid simply would not be the same as it is today.
These people didn’t do it alone, nobody does it alone, but without these people things would be substantially different. It’s a steve jobs type influence.
I was with you till you said Steve Jobs. Jobs was only good at abusing his employees and marketing.