rdue."
Brown’s statement came in response to an online petition campaign earlier this year demanding a posthumous pardon for Turing. Initiated by computer scientist Dr. John Graham-Cumming, the petition was signed by tens of thousands, including a host of well-known Britons — among them the openly gay actor and TV personality Stephen Fry, the biologist and best-selling author Richard Dawkins, and the Booker Prize-winning novelist Ian McEwan.
Brown’s apology for what happened to Turing raised more than a few eyebrows in the UK because the dour prime minister, heavily influenced by a father who was a minister of the austere Church of Scotland, has been notoriously unsympathetic to the LGBT rights cause.
The political editor of the Sunday newspaper the Observer wrote, "What had persuaded a man so famously uninterested in gay rights that he has regularly failed to vote in Parliament on key gay issues to intervene?" The newspaper reported that Sarah Brown, the prime minister’s wife — who has been outspoken in support of gay rights, hosted gay activists and intellectuals at the prime minister’s official residence at 10 Downing Street, and made headlines when she marched in this year’s London Gay Pride parade — played the key role in persuading Brown to issue the apology. She was also responsible for initiating the Gay Icons exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery, where Turing’s image now hangs.
British gay historian and journalist Neil McKenna — whose must-read, critically acclaimed revisionist biography "The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde," was reviewed by this reporter in 2005 ("Wilder Than We Knew," Aug. 25-31, 2005 — was asked by this reporter to put Brown’s apology in perspective, and responded in an angry e-mail worth quoting at length.
He wrote: "Gordon Brown has said that he is ‘sorry’ that Alan Turing was persecuted, that his treatment was ‘appalling,’ that thousands of other gay men were persecuted and that millions live in fear. Sorry? Is that it? Is that all? Twelve measly lines in an official Downing Street press release to say how sorry the British state is that for 21 years, from 1945 to 1966, it did everything it could to extirpate homosexuality from the British. That thousands, probably tens of thousands, of men were surveilled, stalked, arrested, and sent to prison, or offered — as Turing was — chemical castration, or aversion therapy consisting of electric shock torture or the administration of emetics to ‘correct’ homosexual behavior. That tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of gay lives — including mine — were warped, twisted, damaged, and destroyed by the British state’s blithe belief that it knew best.
"The most insulting part of the press release is the party political point Brown cannot resist making. It is, according to Brown, entirely down to New Labour that LGTB people have any rights at all. How dare he patronize us. Twelve measly, miserable, weasel-worded lines in which Brown fails to acknowledge the half-century-long journey of gay activists who struggled to try and right these wrongs, to try and achieve justice for gay men. I can remember the late 1980s and the early 1990s when Labour was far from friendly towards gay men, when it writhed in a sea of lies, half-truths, and half-promises about reforming the law. I can remember the time was Brown was as silent and as sullen on these issues as the grave.
"We deserve more than twelve measly, miserable, weasel-worded lines. If Gordon Brown was really, truly, feelingly, passionately sorry he should set up a Royal Commission to document and enquire into the holocaust of gay men that took place in Britain. And while we are about it, when is Gordon Brown, on behalf of the British Government, going to apologize for returning those ‘pink triangle’ prisoners liberated from the concentration camps to German Prisons with the foul and twisted logic that these men had been convicted of criminal offences and as concentration camps were not prisons, they had to serve their sentences?
"Brown’s statement means nothing to the LGTB movement. It probably 