rk 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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing. David Leavitt’s biography, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer (Norton, 2007), provides a complete account from a queer point of view of Turing’s persecution.
Doug Ireland can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND, at http://direland.typepad.com/.