Alan Turing - gay and genius, who invented computers and helped finish World War II

One of the most influential people throughout all of World War II was the amazing Alan Turing. The contributions that Alan Turing provided to the British intelligence agencies during World War II was so profound, many people have said that he shortened the war by two years.

His unbelievable intellect is the key reason why he was able to break the German Enigma code. Unfortunately, Alan was also a gay man living in the wrong era. While his sexuality as a gay man would not be a problem today, the 1940s was a different time. Back then, gay men and lesbians, or just homosexuals as they were called, were thought to be evil or defective humans.

Alan did his best to hide his homosexuality, but in the end, somebody found out his secret. Instead of being praised genius and wartime contributions, he was castrated and charged with homosexuality. The British government and its anti-homosexual policy at the time completely overlooked this amazing man's accomplishments for British society and instead focused on his sexuality.

The sad fate of Alan Turing is just one reason why gay men and gay women need to be viewed as equal human beings in their own right. Alan would have never been treated as terribly if he was a straight man. His sexuality has nothing to do with his loyalty to the British government and his oath to destroying the Nazi regime.

His young life

Alan Turing was born on June 23rd, 1912. His middle name was Mathison, and he was born to a mother and father whose names were Julius and Ethel. Alan also got a brother named John.

While Turing was born in London, his family and he moved to the south of England. Even when he was just a Schoolboy, many of his teachers said that he had an intelligence that was nothing like any of the smart kids that they had tutored in previous years.

Alan and his brother would not always stay with his parents. His father had a civil service job which kept him traveling back and forth from England and India. Whenever his mother and father would leave for India, they would stay with a friend of the family. It was a friend of his father's and the two had met when they were both in the Army together.

Even at the age of 12 Alan Turing was already a determined young man who desperately wanted an education. Find the most telling moments of his young life was attending Sherborne School. The school was a boarding school that was about 60 miles away from his home. However, he would go on to live at a Westcott House which was the boarding house associated with the school.

The first day of school was also the first day of a major general strike. Workers were tired of the unbelievably low wages and terrible conditions for coal miners. Coal miners and their family members all gathered to strike, resulting in 1.7 million workers protesting Nationwide.

Because of the general strike, Alan had no way of getting to his first day of school. Instead of waiting for the general strike to be over, he took initiative. He strapped all the things he needed onto his bicycle and pedaled 60 miles over the course of two days. When nighttime came on the first day, he even rented a room at a nearby Inn. At such a young age, Alan had far more determination and initiative than some adults who were two to three times his age.

His life and his work

After completing primary School and secondary school, he went on to King's College which is located in Cambridge and pursued a degree in mathematics. It was at Cambridge when he developed his Turing machine. It was a machine that demonstrates yes or no questions that are based in math. In previous machines before the Turing machine, yes or no questions were not able to be answered by computations.

After completing his mathematics PhD at Princeton University, he moved back to England. It worked around for a time until the second world war broke out. Alan knew he could use his mathematical mind for the good of England and so he applied for a job at the Government Code and Cypher School. This place was located at Bletchley Park. The government School was regarded as Britain's cryptography and code-breaking center.

Alan was not a regular government employee. He worked for a secret part of the school known as Hut 8. This department is directly responsible for decoding German messages known as the Enigma. This department created an Enigma machine which was able to decode every single secret message that was encoded in the Enigma code.

Before Alan developed the Enigma machine, the British government was using a Polish cryptography device that was developed by Marian Rejewski. This device was known as the Bombe. It was given to the British by the Polish and effort to band together and fight off the Nazi regime.

In November 1942, Alan worked with US Naval crypto analysts as they were trying to decode a new Enigma code called the naval Enigma. The Nazis used it for all of their Naval messages.

After the war was over, Turing took a brief hiatus and went to work in Bell labs in the United States. He was not impressed with the American's coding machines.

Alan Turing forever changed the world of calculations and computers. He's known as the father of not only theoretical computer science but also artificial intelligence.

Romantic endeavors

Back in the 1940s, there was absolutely no way that gay men and gay women could take lovers and have partners without fear of punishment and imprisonment. Any romances or inclinations that he had towards any men had to be completely discreet and hidden away.

Alan was not someone who pursued romantic situations. He was incredibly shy and completely preoccupied with mathematics in science.

At one time, Turing decided to propose to one of his colleagues named Joan Clark. Joan Clark was a crypto analyst that worked alongside him. She's quite a remarkable woman in her own right. She was hired by Hut 8 and the code-breaking departments of Bletchley Park after she solved a code hidden in a crossword puzzle. Throughout her short-lived time as his fiancé, Joan said that Alan was never physical with her and the kisses he gave her were short.

The very next day after Alan proposed to Joan, he told her that he had a homosexual tendency. She was slightly worried, but she felt like she could continue her engagement and marriage to Alan. Many of their colleagues said that they were a very nice couple. Ultimately it was Alan who rescinded his offer of marriage. However, the two stayed friends and there was no bitterness between them. Because he told Joan about his homosexual inclinations, he knew that he could trust her.

Obviously, their engagement was extremely short-lived, and they never got married.

He had a short romantic relationship with a man named Arthur Murray. But this romance would not last long and not because they grew apart or either one of them cheated. Their romance had to end because the British police arrested Alan Turing and charged him with indecent Acts.

Many reports say that when he was arrested and charged with indecent acts, touring said that he was gay men and said that he was not guilty. He disagreed with the law and said it was not just.

Has Alan Turning been recognized in our modern times?

Yes, many important people, along with the British government and many science organizations, now openly recognized the importance of Alan Turing and his amazing intellect. They also recognize that he should have never been treated so terribly during the final years of his life.

Time Magazine included Alan Turing in a list titled 100 most important people of the 20th century. The magazine came out in 1999 and the writer of the article said, "Everyone who taps away at a keyboard, opens a word processing program or opens a spreadsheet is working on an incarnation of the Turing machine."

The college in which Alan graduated from, King's College, laid down a blue plaque on the 100-year anniversary of his birth on June 23rd, 2012.

In 2009, the British government officially issued an apology to Alan Turing for convicting him of indecent Acts. In the apology, one of these statements reads as "But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present."

In 2014, a movie was made about Alan Turing and his work and treatment by the government because of his homosexuality. The movie is called The Imitation Game and it stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing and Keira Knightley as Joan Clark. The food was very well made, and it received accolades and acclaim from the majority of critics.

Other things to know about Alan Turing

He was so intelligent he defeated himself. In the middle of World War II, Alan Turing was concerned that he would lose all of his life savings. The Germans had already invaded several countries and it even took one of their most important allies, France, completely hostage. The Germans are also bombing many parts of England including the capital of London on a daily to weekly basis. So, he decided to take all of his life savings and convert them into silver bars.

In the event of a German invasion, he would be able to grab the silver bars from his hideaway space and flee to a safe area. He did not want to keep the silver bars in his home, so he buried them in Bletchley Park. He chose this place because he was at work far more often than he was at home. In a pitch, he could run from his office to the park to get his silver bars.

He invented a code that would allow him to quickly find the area where he hid his silver bars. However, several years passed before he returned to get his silver bars back. As he looked at the code for several days, he realized that he could not decipher what he wrote.

The city had also constructed some renovations to the area which made it more difficult for Alan to find his silver box. In the end, he was never able to find them, and the bars are still buried somewhere in the park.

He loved to run and could have probably been an Olympic-level Runner. It was so fast at running that he did not have to take public transportation. He would run wherever he needed to go. Sometimes he raced colleagues to a destination. They would travel to the area through public transport, and he would be on foot. He would often win

One of the reasons why Alan Turing was so shy in public and when talking to colleagues was due to his stutter. It wasn't a very strong stutter, but it came out from time to time. History was also the main reason why he did not go attend radio shows, even though they wanted to interview him.

When he was with his friends he was not in the closet. It may have been illegal for Alan Turing to be an openly gay man come up, but he knew who he could trust and around which people he could show his true personality.

Historians and biographers are not sure if he committed suicide or if he accidentally poisoned himself. Some say that because his chemical castration changed his body, he could no longer live with who he was. Also, being arrested and tried with and charged with indecent acts, along with the chemical castration, severely affected his mental health. Some people say that he was experimenting with cyanide and exposed himself too much to it.