Gay mathematical genius Alan Turing, considered the father of modern computers and a national hero in Britain for breaking the Nazis’ Enigma code and other German military ciphers and thus shortening the war, has received an official apology from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown for being prosecuted and chemically castrated for his homosexuality. The unspeakable torture drove the brilliant scientist to suicide in 1954 at the young age of 41.
Turing’s gay martyrdom was movingly recounted in the prize-winning play "Breaking the Code" by Hugh Whitemore, which had a long run in London’s West End before coming to Broadway for six months, where it received three Tony Award nominations in 1988. The play was later made into a 1996 BBC film seen on American television on several occasions. Noted Tony Award-winning actor Sir Derek Jacobi starred as Turing in all three productions.
In 1999, Time magazine named Turing one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century, saying of his seminal role in computers, "The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine."
In a September 10 statement posted on his official website, Prime Minister Brown said of Turing, "It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely."
Brown went on to say, "While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time, and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair, and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him," adding, "This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality, and long overdue."
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 