Alan Turing: Oh No He Didn't

Alan Turing could not have cracked the Enigma Code without the help of Polish mathematicians and it is time to "right the wrong" and acknowledge their contribution, the Polish government has said.

Deciphering the German system is believed to have shortened World War Two by two years and saved countless lives. 

But few people realise that early Enigma codes had already been broken by the Poles who then passed on the knowledge to Britain shortly before the outbreak of war.

They even taught Turing how to build electro-mechanical devices which simulated the workings of the Enigma machine and enabled operators to cycle through one possible setting after another.
By the time war broke out the Germans had increased the sophistication of the machine and the Poles were struggling to make more headway. But based on the Polish knowledge, Turing managed to build a huge computer that would finally crack the cipher.

However, despite their help, history and Hollywood has largely ignored their role. The most recent film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, barely mentioned the Poles.

Now the Polish government has launched a touring exhibition entitled "Enigma – Decipher Victory” to remind the world of their crucial contribution. They have already taken the exhibition to Canada and Brussels...

Poland’s main codebreakers were Jerzy Rozycki, Henryk Zygalski and Marian Rejewski who joined the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau in Warsaw... 

Telegraph.

Seems to be the gay media who are keenest on the lie that 'Alan Turing cracked the  Enigma code', partly as so many of them seem to revel in ignorance, and partly to push the myth of Turing as The Great Gay Martyr - even though it's far from certain he committed suicide.

Historic Gross Indecency: Pardon Me

This article in Guardian Weekend is pretty powerful and moving stuff; five men tell how their lives were ruined after being arrested over old anti-gay laws against sex such as 'gross indecency'.
Over 600,000 people have now signed an online petition; Pardon all of the estimated 49,000 men who, like Alan Turing, were convicted of consenting same-sex relations under the British "gross indecency" law (only repealed in 2003), and also all the other men convicted under other UK anti-gay laws.
But many people sympathetic to Turing - including Andrew Hodges who wrote the biography on which The Imitation Game was based - had misgivings over the call for his royal pardon.
Further, as the author points out in the introduction; 'In 2012, it became possible for those convicted of homosexual “sex offences” to have their criminal records erased under the Protection Of Freedoms Act – though not those deemed to have been committed in a public place such as toilets, where much of the entrapment went on.'
One of the men interviewed who was discharged from the army has successfully applied to have his criminal record erased and army record cleared.
Two were arrested for cottaging, so at present can not even have their criminal records erased.
One was caught at a cruising ground with a 15 year-old - this is still a crime. Ditto.
Fagburn can understand why anyone, and not just past victims of state homophobia like these six men, are angry about what's happened, and want some kind of apology.
But can anyone explain what this call for an official pardon can achieve?

Alan Turing: The Imitation Gay

It was impossible not to be moved by Imitation Game screenwriter Graham Moore's Oscar acceptance speech about his teen suicide attempt. However, The Imitation Game itself is a steaming pile of homophobic and misogynistic crap.

Wait, isn't the movie all "yayz for the gayz?" That's the bandwagon it tries to ride, but it does so by serving up a giant helping of last-century stereotypes that any Republican senator would find comforting. (It's also factually wrong in dozens of ways.) 

Above all, the Imitation Turing, though persecuted for his sexuality, demonstrates no sexuality at all in the movie. He's a celibate queer martyr. The most graphic scene isn't graphic at all. He merely talks about "paying another man to touch my penis." According to the movie, this handsome, athletic and charming man has to pony up cash just to get a hand job.

As Christian Caryl writes in the New York Review of Books, this movie "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" (as he did in 1953 after his hormone punishment ended).

The Hollywood Turing is just a collection of anti-gay clichés rolled into one -- a rich, precious and bitchy snot. He has no personal power, needing a good (straight) woman to take care of him and tattling to Winston Churchill when he doesn't get his way...

Mark Saltveit, Proud Queer Monthly.

Hahaha, I love this man.

Oscars: No Moore

[Graham Moore shared] with the millions of telecast viewers that at the age of 16, he tried to kill himself “because I felt weird, and I felt different, and I felt that I did not belong. And now I’m standing here, and I would like this moment to be for that kid out there who feels she’s weird or she’s different or she doesn’t fit in anywhere. Yes, you do. … Stay different, and then when it’s your turn, and you’re standing on this stage, please pass the message to the next person that comes along.”

I wish that Moore had drawn a clearer line between his comments about Turing—a man who was persecuted and prosecuted for his homosexuality—and his “it gets better” message to teens who are merely weird and different. For one thing, overemphasizing the connection between queer teens and suicide can be dangerous. But it’s also important to note that being gay simply isn’t the same as being a “geek.” Moore may see them as comparable (and, though he has identified himself as straight, his affect may have opened him up to homophobic bullying), but the truth of the matter is that the social force behind anti-gay prejudice is far stronger and more pernicious than the animus against social outcasts. Moore’s heart was surely in the right place, but I wish he hadn't conflated these identities.

June Thomas, Slate.

Well said.

Can't see why some people are gushing over this boo hoo squish squish patronising gay death cult guff.

Update: Though he appears to be absolutely screaming, Graham Moore has reiterated to BuzzFeed News that he is not gay. Deffo.

Update2: Oops! - thanks to Nick. x

Update3: More from Slate's J Bryan Lowder, Is It “Weird” to Be Gay? What Graham Moore’s Speech Really Means.

The Imitation Game: Imitations Of Life

Was there a version of the script where Turing has a male lover?
First of all, the time period we’re all focusing on, he didn’t have one. He described it in his own words as a “sexual desert” in a letter. The whole thing is his relationship with Christopher [Turing’s male crush seen in flashbacks in grade school], about unfulfilled love.

But Turing did have relationships with men.
He had people he had sex with, yes — especially in the time after the war, when he’s living in Manchester. The break-in that happens in the film is a male lover, which is discussed. It was actually someone he paid to have sex with. It was more of a hustler.

But we never see Turing in a relationship with an adult man. Don’t you think that would have enriched the character?
Not really. The whole movie, the way it’s structured, we don’t know anything about this man. The whole investigation starts because he’s hiding something, but he’s not hiding what we think. It can’t start off with him having sex. It was not because we were afraid it would offend anybody. If I did the structure and had this thing about a straight character, I would never have a sex scene to prove that he’s heterosexual. If I have a gay character in a movie, I need to have a sex scene in it — just to prove that he’s gay? I’m not shying away from it. His whole relationship, how he falls in love and the importance of him being a gay man, was all about secrecy.

Some have criticized the movie for not including that.
During his time, the relationship that was important was the relationship with Joan Clarke [played by Keira Knightley]. They were engaged for six months. It’s all about a lost love. He didn’t have a male companion. He had some random people he had sex with. He also had, this was funny, he went to Norway to have sex in a gay sauna, a secret club. He had some sexual partners, but it was few and far between. The only reason to have a sex scene in the film would be to satisfy critics who feels that every gay character needs to have a gay sex scene....

From an Oscars night interview in Variety with The Imitation Game director, Morten Tyldum.

What a funny little man.

No, of course you don't need a gay sex scene just cause a character's gay.

The point is why Turing's homosexuality - something instrumental, not incidental to his story - was so downplayed.

Fagburn's Oscars wishlist - anyone but Cummerbund. 

Fagburn: Film Of The Year

This heart-freezing true story of Lesbians And Gays Support The Right-Wing (LGSR), tells how a group of Tory gaylords infiltrated our movement, and, during capitalism's greatest crisis in almost a century, got people to obsess about gay marriage and Russia instead. A lesson from history.

'A real feel-good movie that's so politically banal we'll have to invent an award for it!' Attitude.

Runner-up: The Disinformation Game - Benedict Cumberbatch plays tortured gay boffin Alan Turing, who, after finding the love of a good woman, invented the computer and single-handedly won the Second World War.

'Hats of too Alan Turink - a gay name that must now go down in histree' QX Magazine

The Imitation Game: Making A Code

Respected straight actor plays tortured gay man? It's movie awards gold!

But what that galaxy of stars on the poster doesn't tell you is that even the most glowing reviewers had some serious reservations.

A problem summed up in the headline in The Independent, Benedict Cumberbatch's Alan Turing is superb - but the film is evasive over the character's sexuality.

The Daily Telegraph elaborates;

It's the lack of risk here that grates most. Turing was homosexual, got convicted for gross indecency in 1952, and committed suicide because of his persecution and loneliness. Cumberbatch can suggest all this, but only in outline, because the film backs away in embarrassment from showing a single encounter between him and another man. 

This project inches around the private life of a genius: though he gets to narrate, it adopts an extremely proper attitude towards what should stay private, which might strike some viewers as closer to 1952's prudishness than 2014's relative open-mindedness. 

It shouldn't matter in the slightest that Turing was gay. It shouldn't have ended his career in disgrace the way it did. But one can be forgiven, surely, for wondering, and wanting to see, if it mattered to him.

Peter Tatchell reminds Telegraph readers, Homophobia is still with us 60 years after the death of Alan Turing.

And the hundreds of comments from Telegraph readers show how right he is.

Mr Tatchell, most people welcome I'm sure the more enlightened times that we live in and are pleased to see the back of the pernicious laws that made life so miserable for Homosexuals. But please don't confuse a sense of weary indignation as being homophobia at having our noses rubbed in homosexuality (as well as diversity), and at having laws put on the statute books to try and normalise the abnormal. etc etc.

It's four stars from The Times, but they warn;

Directed by Morten Tyldum, the story goes from the homosexual and mathematical crushes of Turing’s Sherborne schooldays in 1928 to 1951, when detectives arrived at a botched burglary at the professor’s house in Manchester and began the investigation that led to his eventual prosecution for “gross indecency” and chemical castration at a time when homosexuality was still illegal. Yet, mysteriously, we never see Turing in an adult sexual relationship with another man.

All this sits uncomfortably with the rest of the detail provided: Turing’s gay crushes at school, his friendships, his near-marriage, his listlessness under chemical castration. Why not provide the missing piece of the human jigsaw and show that Turing could have as much passion for a man as he did for the Enigma machine? Do we detect the cold hand of the producers, who include American Harvey Weinstein, on the script, sanitising the story for the middlebrow and American market?

Tyldum is probably not to blame — the director’s fondness for dark, twisted drama was revealed in his recent Headhunters — but The Imitation Game has a whiff of Sunday evening telly conventionality. Either Turing’s hidden homosexuality should have been properly handled, or the drama should have focused purely on Hut 8.

Their review is complimented by an article; The Imitation Game’s makers on accusations of masking Turing’s sexuality

The oft-repeated complaint that the film doesn't show Turing being intimate with a gentleman has not been plucked from the pink ether either, an earlier script had a gay sex scene.

The Times quote the ever-hopeless Benedict Cumberbatch; “I would have been happy to play one of those [sex] scenes or not because to me it’s less about his sexuality than it is about love. That he loved men was just a fact for him.”

Good grief.

PS Did anyone else think the timing of Benedict's announcement of his engagement (to a lady!) just last week was, erm, timely?

Cumberbatch: Simpleton

Interviewed by [Andrew] Marr – who labelled him "the man they call Britain's favourite otter" [!!??] – Cumberbatch also defended The Imitation Game against suggestions that the film doesn't pay enough attention to Bletchley Park code-breaker Alan Turing's homosexuality.

"I don’t quite know what that means because to me his sexuality is very, very clear in the film. Because we don’t show him in bed with anybody? We don’t show anyone who’s heterosexual having a moment of sexual intimacy in the film.

"The specific importance of his sexuality is the fact that it was criminalised by that society at that time and that he was punished after saving the democracy and government that was in power by that democracy and government for his identity. And I just hope that this film is about his achievements, is about his life, is about his loves as well – and it is about his sexuality and that’s very, very strongly part of his identity, both in the film and his story."

Yet more first-class guff from upper-class twit Little Lord Cumberbatch in the new Radio Times.

See also...

Lucky readers of yesterday's Sunday Telegraph got a chance to pick up a copy of Andrew Hodge's Turing biography - an official tie-in to the release this week of The Imitation Game.

Interesting, as Hodges has denounced the film's heterosexualisation of Turing.

Fagburn notes the free book is an abridged version. 

I wonder which bits they left out?

Unthought For The Day: Benedict Cumberbatch

‘For me there’s explicit love in the film, and the fact of his sexuality being homosexual doesn’t make any difference. If it would have added to the film, we’d have done it. I’d have no qualms about filming those scenes, expressing that side of a character’s relationship to his body. It’s partly to do with the logical loop of the film, the poetical loop. It’s about what’s not seen, it’s about secrets, what’s repressed – and his sexuality was. This is a man who’s never going to be allowed to love, and that’s really his tragedy and the tragedy of the film...

‘It sort of is, but more important is the idea that the man at the centre of it, who was persecuted for being different, still stands sadly for a lot of persecution that goes on around the world today. That’s what terrifies me – that it's as prevalent now, and that this is how we treated one of our war heroes, and a great scientist, someone who’s up there with Charles Darwin; he should be on banknotes. I don’t think Alan set himself up as a martyr, but he sure as hell was treated as one in a sense.’

Cumberbatch’s voice rises in indignation. ‘This was 60 years ago – here, in this country! Giving a man injections to turn him into something desexualised, that ruined his brain. He was being given weekly oestrogen doses and at one point the doctor said, this is a bit embarrassing for both us; why don’t I give you an implant so you don’t have to keep coming back for these appointments every week. He was given the implant in his thigh. It was supposed to stop after two years, and it didn’t.

‘A colleague of his whom I spoke to told me Turing had said, “It’s not really cricket, is it” – being wry and humorous about it. But then one night he pulled out a carving knife from the kitchen drawer and tried to gouge it out of his body.’ Cumberbatch sighs deeply. ‘To reach that state of mind... The only thing he had left to love – that he was legally allowed to love – was his work, and even that was denied him, to the extent that he took his own life by swallowing cyanide.’

The hilariously thick and insincere Benedict Cumberbatch in the Sunday Telegraph. 

Oh do shut up!

Alan Turing probably didn't commit suicide - though that rather spoils the myth of The Great Gay Martyr - and I'm pretty sure he'd shudder at the very thought of being put on a sodding banknote. 

This profile also contains the classic line/lie; Turing 'invented the early computing machine that cracked the German Enigma code.'

It didn't - that was the work of three Polish mathematicians; Jerzy Rozycki, Henryk Zygalski and Marian Rejewski.

Can they be on a banknote, Ben?

• Images by Darren and Polari magazine. x

I'd rather catch my Dad dancing in a local night club to Rhianna or wearing a nose ring than to see him like this: pic.twitter.com/1X1S0w6ykb
— Madeleine Teahan (@MadeleineTeahan) October 28, 2014

£45 t-shirt made in 62p an hour sweatshop claim.

These 'This is what a feminist looks like' t-shirts were made for the Fawcett Society - current chair, Angela Mason, ex-head of Stonewall and former cadre of anarcho-terrorist gang, the Angry Brigade.

The Imitation Game: Straight Up

The Independent.

Seeing as Cumberbatch has Alan Turing falling in love with a woman, I think it's Oscars all round.

Update: Benedict Cumberbatch talks crap to the Daily Beast...

The only thing that’s in contention, really, is whether he died by accident or on purpose. His suicide note is framed to make it look like an accident. His coroner’s report said that it was a solution of cyanide and water, and then there was a bite of the apple.

There was no suicide note and the apple was not tested for cyanide.

He goes on, equally witlessly...

Who’s Lord McNally? Well, he’s probably gay. They’re always the biggest homophobes.

Which is a homophobic cliché.

Which proves one of the benefits of a private education; the ability to talk absolute rubbish with absolute confidence.

Turing: Trailer

'Based on a true story' where he appears to be in love with a dame.

PS Pet Shop Boys' Alan Turing Proms piece, A Man From The Future, is broadcast by BBC Radio 3 on Wednesday.

Alan Turing: Is That It?

Alan Turing died on June 7th 1954.

He was 41.

Nobody can be certain if his death by cyanide poisoning was suicide or a tragic accident.

Despite what you may read or hear elsewhere today.

So, what's going on? Tortured Genius: What was Alan Turing really like? BBC World Service. Benedict Cumberbatch outwits Nazis in The Imitation Game - First Look Entertainment Weekly. Alan Turing: 60 Years On Huffington Post (Hopeless). Turing2014: Can machines think? @ Royal Society, London...

Err, I hope this isn't it.

Alan at school, 1923, by his mother, Ethel.

• Alan Turing: The Enigma Andrew Hodges' website. The Turing Digital Archive.

Sunday Times
A Man From The Future is sold out - but some tickets will be available on the night. 

Sherlock: Elementary, My Dear Cumberbatch

‘Sometimes the right man and the right part comes along and they fuse.

‘I think there is something about Sherlock Holmes, which has possibly always been the case – there’s a kind of unapproachability about him. He’s not interested in sex… apparently. So you immediately get that Mr Darcy thing going on.

‘He can’t be tamed. It’s attractive. Those are the people we are attracted to – the ones that aren’t interested.

‘I think it’s that and the combination of the Byronic looks that Benedict has – and the coat! – that’s made him into, possibly, the first sexy Sherlock Holmes.’

Mark Gatiss talking to Metro about his strange fascination with Sherlock Holmes and Benedict Cumberbatch, at London Lesbian And Gay Switchboard's 40th birthday party last night. *

He also said Sherlock may bot be back until 2016. 

The Imitation Game, Mr Cabbagepatch's Alan Turing biopic, is due at the of this year.

* LLGS 0300 330 630.

Update: How Gay Star News excitedly covered Switchboard's 40th anniversary...

*Doffs cap* Thank you ma'am!

But which modest gay campaigner do we really have to thank for this historic achievement?

Alan Turing: 101 Today

This is Alan Turing's statue in Sackville Park, Manchester today, his 101st birthday.
Nice one, Manchester!

x

Image via @thehistoryb0y

 • A NEW film about the pioneering wartime code breaker Alan Turing has been attacked by his biographer for exaggerating a love affair and making a fictional connection to a notorious spy.
The film, The Imitation Game, stars Benedict Cumberbatch, best known for his role in BBC1’s hit Sherlock, as Turing and is based on a biography by Andrew Hodges, an Oxford maths academic. Joan Clarke, another Bletchley code breaker, is set to be played by Keira Knightley as Turing’s girlfriend, despite the fact that he was gay.
Hodges, who was sent a script, is alarmed by what he says are inaccuracies in the American-financed film, to be directed by the Norwegian Morten Tyldum whose last production was the violent thriller Headhunters.
“They have built up the relationship with Joan much more than it actually was.”

Sunday Times.