Fifty-seven years after castrating Alan Turing for being a gay man, Her Britannic Majesty's Government has apologized for what it did to him. Jolly good that. It's a reasonable first step in righting a horrible wrong for a monarch who was on the throne then, too, but it's not enough.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown, often criticized for " lang=EN leading from behind," doesn't mention the reason for the apology until the fourth paragraph of his seven-paragraph statement. Then after noting, "Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated" he finally admits, "His treatment was of course utterly unfair."
Alan Turing, often considered to be the father of modern computing, simply was one of the most brilliant and original minds of the 20th century. Born in England on June 23, 1912, his ideas and accomplishments affect everyone who uses a computer.
In 1999, Time magazine named Turing one of the 100 most influential people of the last hundred years. One reason was his 1937 paper, "On Computable Numbers," which "provided a blueprint for what would eventually become the electronic digital computer." Another was his work on breaking Nazi Germany's World War II Enigma codes; his design for a primitive computing devise that could decipher enemy messages quickly and accurately saved untold thousands of lives.
Turing showed continued genius in the ideas he outlined in his 1950 article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," pioneering concepts of artificial intelligence, explaining how computers could teach themselves and providing, in addition, a simple method, now known as the Turing test, that, when passed, proved the subject was intelligent.
A break-in at his home in 1952 ended his remarkable career. Turing reported the crime to the police, telling them that the burglar might be an acquaintance of a young man with whom he was having an affair. At a time when homosexuality could mean a long jail sentence, professional ruin and social ostracism, it was a grievous mistake.
Faced with the more sensational and lascivious prospect of prosecuting an upstanding academic for his sex life, the police lost all interest in pursuing a petty criminal. Instead, they arrested Turing for "gross indecency," the same charge made against Oscar Wilde in 1895.
During his trial, Turing pleaded guilty to 12 counts of indecent acts. His defense? He saw nothing wrong with loving another man. Wilde received a brutalizing jail sentence, but the court gave Turing a choice: go to prison or be placed on probation after consenting to be castrated.
Naturally wishing to avoid imprisonment, Turing agreed to castration through a series of estrogen injections intended to "beef up his masculine urges and suppress his homosexuality." Not surprisingly, the treatment ruined his health and his life. He became impotent. He suffered major damage to his nervous system, waves of depression, and despair. Denied a security clearance and forbidden to travel abroad, he tried to continue his research, but his mind instead entered "a slow, sad descent into grief and madness" until his death two years later at the age of 42.
In fairness, Britain at the time was not much different than other places in what was then called the "Free World." In 1909, California enacted a law that provided for the sterilization of anyone convicted two or more times for sexual offenses, provided he or she showed evidence while in prison of being a "moral or sexual pervert." In addition, people sentenced to life imprisonment could be sterilized, without any right to a pre-operative hearing, if they showed "continuing evidence" of "sexual perversion." The law remained in effect until 1951, the year before Turing was convicted of "gross indecency," but sterilization for "sex offenses" continued in the state until 1973.
Turing died on June 7, 1954, two years after his conviction for homosexuality. Suicide? That's what the coroner's inquest ruled, the result of his eating an apple laced with cyanide, although the half eaten apple found with his body was never tested for the poison. Accident? His mother thought so, arguing that he'd inadvertently ingested lab chemicals. Murder? Some speculated he was assassinated by someone because his brilliance as a cryptologist and a computer scientist made him a tempting target for foreign agents and therefore a security risk. Whatever the circumstance, it was a tragic, unnecessary end to a brilliant life.
Now, to make it all better, the British government has apologized for what it did to the man whom Winston Churchill – the nation's prime minister when Turing was castrated – credited with making the biggest single contribution to the Allied victory in World War II. While Brown acknowledges that Turing's treatment lang=EN "was of course utterly unfair," he's also quick to excuse it by stating, "Turing was dealt with under the law of the time." He notes that "thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated," but he doesn't mention that only under pressure did his administration say anything at all.
All of this is simply not enough. We now may have the recognition, but where's the justice? Brown doesn't provide any. The British government continues to resist all efforts to award Turing a posthumous pardon, but even if it grants one to Turing, which is unlikely, it's not sufficient. An evil law is evil always, not only after it's been repealed. It's true, as Brown states, that "we can't put the clock back," but we can exonorate a man who has been convicted of a crime that should not have been a crime. Not simply commute his sentence. Not merely pardon him for his actions. Turing must be exonorated of wrongdoing where there was no wrongdoing.
At the same time, while he's in an apologetic mood, the prime minister can apologize to the thousands of other gay men that Her Britannic Majesty's Government castrated, imprisoned, terrorized, harassed, and humiliated for being gay and whose lives it ruined simply by not allowing them to be themselves.
Bill Lipsky, Ph.D., author of Gay and Lesbian San Francisco (2006), is a board member of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society. Brown's statement is at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/gordon-brown/6170112/Gordon-Brown-Im-proud-to-say-sorry-to-a-real-war-hero.html.