means nothing to Brown himself. It has no historical significance. There has been a change in establishment attitudes towards gay men, but this change has come about over the last fifteen years, beginning with John Major’s invitation to Ian McKellen to Downing Street to talk about a gay rights agenda. I very much doubt whether Gordon Brown even wrote it himself. The statement was only issued in response to an e-petition which thousands had signed. The real question to ask is: would Brown have issued this statement without the e-petition? The answer is quite clearly no. Labour has had twelve years in power. Ample time to apologise. But, curiously, no apology has come forth, until now.
"If Gordon Brown really cared about gay men rather than about saving his miserable political skin in the face of a potential electoral defeat for Labour that will make Dunkirk look like a Sunday School outing, then he would set up compensation schemes for those gay men who were victims of state persecution. Many are still alive. Many more have died. I grew up in a provincial city where I got to know many of these men. I feel their pain. I feel my pain. They were angry, but not angry enough. I am still angry. Furious. Outraged. Disgusted. Twelve measly, miserable, weasel-worded lines to wash away 50 years of pain. It’s not enough. Not anything like enough," McKenna concluded.
Turing’s persecution came at the height of anti-gay Cold War hysteria provoked by the defection to Moscow of the diplomats Guy Burgess, a notorious homosexual, and Donald Maclean, and in the climate of the day homosexuality was virtually equated with treason in the minds of the police. (For more on what is known as The Great Purge of the early 1950s, which ensnared some 5,000 British gay men, see this reporter’s September 6-12, 2007 article, "Free the Buggers.")
In a way, Turing, who had never made a secret of his same-sex orientation, was a victim of his own candor. In January 1952, Turing — who had received an OBE, or Order of the British Empire, for his war work and been made a Fellow of the Royal Society for his mathematical achievements — picked up an unemployed 19-year-old, Arnold Murray, outside a cinema in Manchester and began a brief relationship with him. Turing took a liking to Murray because of their shared interest in the sciences, but after a few meetings, it was clear that their relationship would never go anywhere. Murray was stealing money from Turing, and Turing broke off the relationship, asking the younger man never to return to his home. When Murray and an accomplice broke into his house, Turing reported the crime to the police. During the investigation, Turing off-handedly acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray. Homosexual acts were illegal in the United Kingdom at that time, and so both were charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, the same crime that Oscar Wilde had been convicted of more than 50 years earlier (the law remained on the books until 1967).
Turing was given a stark choice — imprisonment or probation conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido, a form of aversion therapy. He accepted chemical castration via estrogen hormone injections, as a result of which he became impotent and his breasts grew larger. More damaging, however, were the effects on his nervous system. The treatment caused waves of depression and despair. After his conviction, Turing also had his security clearance removed and his working consulting for Britain’s intelligence service ended.
A year after his coercive and barbaric chemical castration began, Turing killed himself by eating a poisoned apple he had laced with cyanide. Urban legend has it that the Apple Computer logo of an apple with a bite taken out of it is a tribute to Turing, the father of computers, although the company has officially denied this.
For more on Alan Turing, see the articles on him in the GLBTQ encyclopedia online http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/turing_a,2.html and on Wikipedia at http://en.w