The ‘Imitation’ Alan Turing vs. the real Alan Turing: Victim vs. hero

But it’s not this fictional subplot that keeps getting referenced in the ever-growing, ever-more fantastical articles about Turing triggered by the film. It’s the big screen fiction of Turing himself.

The choice seems clear: either you embrace the richness of Turing as a character and trust the audience to follow you there, or you simply capitulate, by reducing him to a caricature of the tortured genius. The latter, I’m afraid, is the path chosen by director Morten Tyldum and screenwriter Graham Moore. In perhaps the most bitter irony of all, the filmmakers have managed to transform the real Turing, vivacious and forceful, into just the sort of mythological gay man, whiny and weak, that homophobes love to hate.

This is indicative of the bad faith underlying the whole enterprise, which is desperate to put Turing in the role of a gay liberation totem but can’t bring itself to show him kissing another man – something he did frequently, and with gusto. And it most definitely doesn’t show him cruising New York’s gay bars, or popping off on a saucy vacation to one of the less reputable of the Greek islands. The Imitation Game is a film that prefers its gay men decorously disembodied. – The New York Review of Books: “Saving Alan Turing From His Friends.”

Queen Elizabeth pardoned Turing. Who’s to pardon them after they disembodied Turing, after they chose to ignore the many ways Hodges demonstrated that Turing was out to friends and coworkers to a degree extraordinary in the late 1940s and early 1950s? By the time of his arrest, “He did not wish to be accepted or respected as the person he was not. He was likely to drop a remark about an attractive young man, or something of the kind, on a third or fourth meeting with a generally friendly colleague. To be close to him, it was essential to accept him as a homosexual; it was one of the stringent conditions he imposed. He was ahead of his time, as with all things, in an open insistence on his sexual identity.”

His most intimate friends — no, he was not alone save for “Christopher” – remembered how much more free he seemed after the public exposure from his arrest. “With his reality revealed, Alan dropped his disconcerting evasiveness, and Lyn Newman found that ‘once he had looked directly and earnestly at his companion, in the confidence of friendly talk,’ his eyes, ‘blue to the brightness and richness of stained glass,’ could ‘never again be missed. Such candor and comprehension looked from them, something so civilized that one hardly dared breathe.’”

One oft-echoed article claims that he was “stripped of all dignity, living in shame and despair.” Poppycock! He remained strong, mentally, physically, and emotionally. He was defiant all along, vocally unashamed of being gay, insisting that neither should he have been arrested nor should same sex acts be illegal!  “He talked openly about [his arrest] in the computing laboratory, refusing to show any shame or remorse, or to see the law as anything but an absurdity.” – Andrew Hodges.

In that way – not as the film’s entirely made-up gelatinous victim – he was and still shines as a “gay liberation totem.”

But what about, you might ask, Dear Reader, his infamous forced “castration”?

Yes, of course, Turing’s prosecution was abominable; just as that of the some 49,000 other British men most of whose names we’ll never know and Oscar Wilde who suffered far more during his two years in prison than Turing did during his year’s probation. As unjust as he insisted it was, Turing made light of his brief incarceration and the trial: “Whilst in custody with the other criminals, I had a very agreeable sense of irresponsibility, rather like being back at school. The day of the trial was by no means disagreeable.” He mocked British police as “the poor sweeties.” Nothing they or anyone else did scared Alan Turing straight.

Actual “castration” of males or orchiectomy is the surgical removal of the testicles, and permanently eliminates the production of all but about 5% of testosterone in a man’s body; though at least one German study reported that 18% of men who had been physically castrated were able to have sex 20 years later.

Conversely, “chemical ‘castration'” – as misleading as any metaphor ever — lasts only as long as the chemical is ingested or injected—a man’s hormone balance and sex drive returns to the level they were before intervention.  According to Hodges, it was “a vain attempt to erase his interest in sex.” Turing apparently wisely suggested it himself as an alternative to avoid up to two years in prison – more if the court had treated separately each of the three acts “of gross indecency with Arnold Murray, a male person” he admitted to committing and each of the three times he admitted being “party to the commission of an act of gross indecency with Arnold Murray, a male person.”

He was ordered to undergo “treatment” with a female hormone for one year. In fact, he joked about it with friends and secretly stopped it after nine months: a period unlikely to have resulted in any long term effects such as bone density loss. He did tell friends of some irreversible breast enlargement, though, again, given the short time he was on the hormone it is unlikely to have been significant.

“Defiant again: he could not break British law but he wouldn’t let that stop him. He could go abroad.” – Andrew Hodges. Within months of being put on probation, he took a trip to Norway because he’d heard they had a more open gay subculture and met a gay man who he invited to visit him in Manchester.

We think it reasonable to believe that he was interested in more than simply inviting them for a nice cup of tea.

But what about his arrest destroying his career, losing his security clearance, being forbidden to travel to America, etc., that recurring articles constantly tear up about? The truth is that, with the war over, he was at most an occasional consultant to the government, and I’ve seen no evidence he thought the U.S. was the center of the universe.

Before his arrest he had moved on to other work that had nothing to do with code-breaking and which didn’t require a security clearance. First his groundbreaking work in computer technology and then mathematical biology. His distinguished, highly coveted job at the University of Manchester – where he did not wear jammies and a bathrobe – was unaffected by his arrest, the school having created a Readership in the Theory of Computing chair for him, giving him a pay raise and permission to work on whatever he wanted with their computer, expanding computer science even further. The same month he began seeing Arnold Murray he published what’s considered a masterpiece: The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis.

“The year following his sentencing was marked by some of his most creative work in the field of morphogenesis. He also began to explore a new field of science, theoretical physics.” – David Newton, Alan Turing: A Study in Light and Shadow, 2003.

Copeland is a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, and the author of several books on Turing and the Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing.

“He believes the evidence would not today be accepted as sufficient to establish a suicide verdict. Indeed, he argues, Turing’s death may equally probably have been an accident. Professor Copeland emphasizes, a coroner these days would demand evidence of pre-meditation before announcing a verdict of suicide, yet nothing in the accounts of Turing’s last days suggest he was in anything but a cheerful mood.”

A neighbor testified that he had thrown “such a jolly [tea] party” for her and her son four days before he died. Close friend Robin Gandy said that Turing “seemed, if anything, happier than usual” when he stayed with him the weekend before his death. And – along with upcoming theater tickets and written acceptance of an invitation to a June 24th event of the main British scientific academy, the Royal Society, of which he was a Fellow – the only note he left was a to-do list on his desk of things to be done upon his return to work after that bank holiday.

The BBC article continued:

On another occasion, an experiment had resulted in severe electric shocks. And he was known for tasting chemicals to identify them. Perhaps he had accidentally put his apple into a puddle of cyanide. Or perhaps, more likely, he had accidentally inhaled cyanide vapors from the bubbling liquid. Prof. Copeland notes that the nightmare room had a ‘strong smell’ of cyanide after Turing’s death; that inhalation leads to a slower death than ingestion; and that the distribution of the poison in Turing’s organs was more consistent with inhalation than with ingestion.

What I’ve come to call “Turing Awfulists” aren’t the only ones who seem to want to believe he committed suicide. At the inquest, the coroner mooed: “In a man of his type, one never knows what his mental processes are going to do next.”

“His type”? What type was that? A poof? Pansy? Bugger? Sodomite?

Along with mainstream media hacks, the Awfulists repeatedly declare as if simply reading from a note handed down to them from Goddess on high that he committed suicide because of his arrest or hormone treatment or persecution for being gay; the kind of trope long denounced by activists when employed in novels and film . . . except this film.

Biographer Andrew Hodges bellied close to that bar years before most people today had heard of Turing. While acknowledging that Turing had spoken of suicide long before those events, and that “we don’t know what happened,” emphasis mine, Hodges seems to think that, apparently under surveillance by police or other government agents worrying about what state secrets he might reveal to one of his male partners during pillow talk, he despaired of ever being able to live the life he wanted again. And he ices that cake with a campy fantasy mixing Turing’s alleged lifelong obsession with the poison apple in Disney’s 1937 classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and a supposed brilliant plan to stage his death in a way that would spare his mother’s feelings by letting her believe it was accidental not intentional.

As Hodges is not just a veteran of the gay rights movement in Great Britain but also a gifted mathematician and university professor, I’m almost as surprised by his fairy tale laced explication as I am that he believes that the man we celebrate for helping beat the Nazis was so easily beaten by the British; particularly given the multiple ways he documented Turing’s startlingly preternatural self-acceptance and defiance against anyone who did not understand that being gay was his “normal” at a time when the Mattachine Society was still struggling to get off the proverbial ground in America.