If Alan Turing Were Alive Today, He'd Probably Still Be Dead

Lunar Weight celebrates Alan Turing's 96th birthday.

Why 96th, you may ask? Well, because for those familiar with non-decimal number systems, 96 translates as 1100000 in binary, and 60 in hex. 1100000 ÷ 60 = 18333 1/3, which according to Kabbalistic tradition, prognostically indicates that Lunar Weight totally forgot Turing's 95th birthday last June 24th, and will undoubtedly forget his 97th next June 24th.

Turing's legacy largely involves being the father of the digital computer (this honor is, in some ways, misappropriated, but the people being robbed of the title are Polish, and they're used to that kind of shit), without which Emily Gould wouldn't be inexplicably famous and the rest of us would be forced to date, write novels, or otherwise exist in real life. But there's another, darker (as opposed to dorker) side to his legacy—Turing was one of the great martyrs to Western homophobia.

Yes, Alan Turing was openly blind, err, gay, possibly out of an activist instinct—the same activist instinct that led him to stand up so tenaciously for the idea of machine cognition as being potentially equivalent to human—or possibly from the same affable cluelessness that makes scientists the Beanie Babies of the ivory tower. Regardless, despite his tireless efforts to break Nazi codes during WWII, and the resultant reduction in British sauerkraut consumption and Jew-killing in the ensuing decade, Turing was tried for indecency and chemically castrated with estrogen. Eventually, disgraced and unlaid and possessing of boobies, he killed himself by eating a cyanide-laced apple.

Now, however, as the United States slowly, grudgingly swings towards the idea that gays are people too (or at least California and New York are swinging that way, which are the bits that count; Massachusetts, too, but no one's given a shit what they did since they got bored with burning witches), it's worth noting that what's at stake is not something as cosmetic as the right for Martha Stewart and Modern Bride to exploit a further 15% of the population. What's at stake is a concerted, legal-system-sanctioned effort to reject one of the most persistent and ascientific interpersonal prejudices in Western history.

Let's leave aside the inevitable gay-brain-difference studies, which are a classic instance of a neuropsychological "finding" completely devoid of practical significance beyond "look! See?" dickery. If the idea of rational thought has one end, it's that immaterial conclusions—such as ones indicating that homosexuality is somehow harmful, in need of "fixing," or, for that matter, inevitably synonymous with sweeping (former LW roomies, you know who you are)—can be debunked, cast aside. If any one facet of the classic '50s ideal of progress is worth carrying, it's that things that make no sense can eventually be revealed to make no sense. Homophobia is one of these; as Turing's story suggest, in at least some small realms, rationality might possibly save a life.

{yet there's a footnote here, a counterargument that is still self-aggrandizing in the way that tickles LW's smugbones: note that the British government kindly tried to "fix" Turing. This, too, was somehow informed by an idea of rationality and progress—albeit based on a model that was already well on its way to being debunked, gratzi Signore Kinsey. If only there had been some outside observers around back then to say, "Well, now, that's fucking stupid..." and then link to BoingBoing}