The Turing enigma: Campaigners demand pardon for mathematics genius

Were it not for a gay man named Jonathan, David would have been killed by King Saul. Were it not for a gay man named John, there wouldn't be a "disciple whom Jesus loved" in the Christian Gospels. Were it not for Alan Turing, the ENIGMA code would not have been broken and the Germans would have won the Battle of the Atlantic. Were it not for the gay and lesbians serving in the US armed forces...

The Turing enigma: Campaigners demand pardon for mathematics genius

He should have been hailed a hero for his wartime codebreaking. Instead he was prosecuted for his homosexuality and took his own life. So why has Britain never said sorry? Jonathan Brown reports

Tuesday, 18 August 2009

He may have played a pivotal role in securing victory in the Second World War for his country six years earlier, but few outside the academic community would have recognised Alan Turing as he made his way down Manchester's Oxford Street shortly before Christmas in 1951. Someone who did notice the athletically-built scientist, however, was a young working class gay man called Arnold Murray.

Homosexuality was still illegal under the same repressive laws which had sent Oscar Wilde to jail half a century earlier. But regardless of the risk, the chance encounter was to develop into something more substantial and Murray spent a number of nights at the older man's modest home in suburban Wilmslow.

A month later, after Turing, a veteran of the then still secret Bletchley Park code-cracking team, had been giving a talk to the BBC on his pioneering work on artificial intelligence, he returned home to find his house burgled.

The culprit was an acquaintance of Murray's, who would prey on Murray's lovers, thinking they would be so afraid of being outed that they would not report the thefts to the police.

But Turing defied this convention and went straight to the police, where he admitted his affair – a "crime" for which he was spared the normal two-year jail term in favour of a hormonal treatment designed to beef up his masculine urges and suppress his homosexuality. The resulting publicity was to prove too much to bear and in June 1954, the 41-year-old was found dead in bed by his housekeeper. He had eaten an apple he had laced with poison.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-turing-enigma-campaigners-demand-pardon-for-mathematics-genius-1773480.html

meant to bring joy but so often brings death.

How symbolic. Never heard that detail before.

Turing was a great man, and his treatment was horrific.