An Alan Turing Year That is for Everyone

“A Great science fiction detective story”
- Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine 

Days to Centenary:  170

Believe it or not there are still places on the Earth where there are no internet connections — such places certainly exist in the southern hemisphere, where I live — and over the holidays I was in just such a place, whichI hope explains the absence of new posts on any of my blogs for a little while.

Now that I’m back: Happy Alan Turing Year!

As I counted down to midnight on December 31,  2011 surrounded by family and friends, my thoughts were mostly with the people around me (and others who couldn’t be there), which is as it should be.  But I was certainly aware, as well, that the Turing year was about to begin… was about to begin… and then suddenly had begun.

Happy Alan Turing Year!

For many people this will be a culminating moment.  I imagine it must be such a moment for Andrew Hodges, who many years ago painstakingly pieced together  a myriad of fragments from the life of a man who was too much forgotten and pieced them together into a biography that helped revive him in our collective memory.

It was Hodges’ book that first exposed me to Turing in the 1980s.  I recently bought my fourth — or is it fifth? — copy of Alan Turing: The Enigma, because I can’t resist giving the book away when I meet someone whom I think might enjoy it or benefit from it.  Then, after a time of not having it on my shelf, I’m suddenly afflicted with the need to read it again and have to go out and buy another copy and each time I return to it I learn something new.  For that iterative, cumulative experience, thank you Dr. Hodges, and Happy Alan Turing Year.

And along with him, a very big thank you and Happy Alan Turing Year to the many good people (in part represented here) — most of whom will never have the profile that Dr. Hodges does — who have worked so hard to ensure that the Alan Turing Year happened at all, and who continue to work to ensure that the myriad of events that make up the celebration all over the world actually take place.  You guys are awesome.

And on the topic of people who make the Alan Turing Year happen, having acknowledged all the official folks, let’s not forget the Turing Elves, those unofficial individuals who — through works of art and DIY technical projects and a myriad of other endeavors that are as disparate and entertaining as the Elves themselves — help make every year Alan Turing Year.

And just as it’s a culminating moment for Dr. Hodges, for the official ATY folks, and for the Elves, I can only imagine that it must also be such a moment for Turing’s surviving family members, who only learned many years after the event of Turing’s important role in the war, who finally saw him receive the apology he deserved from the government that persecuted him, and who may now at long last see him pardoned (see this post), which is the most complete vindication that the law can extend to him at this late date.  This is the year the family Turing (whether they bear the name or not) get to finally enjoy the honour that should have been his and theirs a long, long time ago.

It will also be a culminating moment for the members of an LGBT community that is by now so multi-generational, international, and diverse that it can hardly be called one community at all.  It is a constellation of communities that has,  since the beginning of the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s, evolved  to have a strength and a public profile that once would have been unthinkable.

Even now it remains a reality for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, the transgendered, and the queer, that each person’s personhood — their character, their intrinsic nature, their contribution to the world, their strengths and flaws, their very self — is too often overshadowed by the simple fact of their sexual orientation.  It’s maddening to be reduced in that way and this recognition of Turing helps to minimize that kind of reduction.  We’re not where we need to be yet, but when a man of Turing’s stature has gone as long as he has with as little recognition as he’s had almost exclusively because of his sexual orientation, international recognition of the kind that the Alan Turing Year provides is certainly a move in the right direction.

And this should also be a culminating  moment for any number of others who are ignored or dehumanized or belittled on account of factors that ought to have no bearing on one’s view of them or on their ability to participate fully in social and professional life, whether that factor is their race, their gender, their religion, a physical or psychological idiosyncrasy or affliction, or anything else which might impair us in our ability to see them as whole and invididual people while it does nothing at all to diminish them.  The diminishment of any one of us diminishes us all and the long overdue recognition of Turing enriches us all.

Which means that — while we must never allow ourselves to be distracted from Turing himself, his work, and the honours that he’s earned — this is nonetheless an Alan Turing Year for everyone.

So, Happy Alan Turing Year to you.

[Note:  The image in this post was borrowed from here.]

Turing As A Gay Icon

Days to Centenary: 204

In the runup to the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth on June 23, 2012 and the Alan Turing Year events throughout 2012, the world is being exposed to the facts of Alan Turing’s life on a scale that is unmatched in the past.  One of the facts that newcomers to the story are confronted with — alongside Turing’s status as one of the founding fathers of computer science and artificial intelligence and his unparalleled contribution to the Allied victory in World War II — is Turing’s sexuality.

Turing was a gay man living in an era when the word still meant “happy” or “lighthearted” and anyone who acted on a homosexual impulse was subject to criminal prosecution, not only in England where Turing lived but in many other countries as well.

It’s easy to feel smug about such a benighted time, but even now, in a time when condemnation of his persecution is a matter of government policy, it remains a fact that many people react with a small flinch when Turing’s gayness is mentioned, and especially if it is taken out of the realm of dry biographical fact and given vivid life.

Many people have a visceral negative reaction to homosexuality, however much their intellect might tell them that their response is irrational and inappropriate.  No one should be condemned on that basis alone — it’s a reaction that happens at a psychological level that is not easily subject to intervention and in the end one’s conduct is what matters most.  After all, we all have impulses that we recognize as undesirable, and while we work to educate ourselves and mitigate those impulses, we certainly hope to be judged on the decisions we make about which impulses we act on and which ones we don’t rather than being held accountable for every dark thought that arises out of our unconscious.

That said, this kind of lingering discomfort with gay sexuality shouldn’t be allowed to subtly affect our perceptions of Turing, pushing this aspect of his personality into the background where it’s easier for people who have that flinching reaction to ignore it.  One needn’t be confrontational about it, but one must never soft pedal it either.  Being gay isn’t merely a plot point in a life story that may soon grace our movie screens, its an integral fact of a real person’s real life.

So for my part, I want to focus in this post on Alan Turing as a gay man who has rightly taken on an iconic status for LGBT communities and who will increasingly do so as he comes to the attention of more and more people.

(A quick aside on terminology: LGBT stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered, and I use the term “communities” because there is no single, monolithic LGBT community, just as there is no single straight community, or Scottish community, or Buddhist community).

Turing’s achievments as a scientist, including his role in Word War II, are relatively well recognized by now, if not yet on the scale they deserve.   But as a gay man who was hounded into suicide because of his sexuality, Turing is increasingly relevant in the battle for LGBT rights as well — his legacy is one of technological change, but also of social change.

For instance, the It Gets Better campaign features various people — celebrities and non-celebrities, gay and straight — in home-made videos that are intended to help LGBT youth understand that there is a happy life to be had once they get past the bullying of their teen years.  Among other things this is intended to help reduce the horrific rates of suicide amongst LGBT youth.  It Gets Better could just about name Turing, who was himself bullied into suicide by the state, as its patron saint.

President Obama’s “It Gets Better” video:

As Turing gains more and more prominence in the course of the Alan Turing Year, he will no doubt come to the attention of more and more members of the LGBT communities, many of whom will find him in him both a kindred spirit and a source of inspiration.

To some extent this process has been in motion for some time.  Andrew Hodges, author of Turing’s definitive biography and himself a gay rights activist of long standing, has written on him for The Gay and Lesbian Humanist.

The LGBT History Month web site has profiled Turing and So So Gay, which bills itself as the most popular and fastest-growing online LGBT lifestyle magazine in the UK, includes Turing in its list of LGBT heroes.

AMERICAblog Gay, a journal of news and opinion about LGBT politics, named him “hero of the month” in October 2010 and explicitly drew the parallel between Turing’s suicide and the suicides of bullied LGBT youth.

Back in the Gays, a web site that allows users to post stories recounting various aspects of LGBT history, has a page commemorating him, and he has a page in the “icons gallery” of the Circa Club, an online social and  business club for gay men.

Even groups that are not explicitly LGBT-oriented have come to identify Turing with the cause of LGBT equality.  The Online Policy Group, for instance, is not an LGBT group, but a nonprofit organization dedicated to internet policy research, outreach, and action on a variety of issues including access to the internet, privacy, digital defamation, and the digital divide. As its web site proclaims it also

…focuses on Internet participants’ civil liberties and human rights, like access, privacy, safety, and serving schools, libraries, disabled, elderly, youth, women, and sexual, gender, and ethnic minorities.

The OPG’s program for dealing with LGBT issues is named in part after Turing (The QueerNet/Turing Program).

In commerce we can see the same phenomenon.  Amazon.com, the giant online bookseller, includes books about Turing in its LGBT book section.

In terms of public attention, Turing’s star has never shone brighter than it does right now, and it’s likely that his notoriety will grow substantially before the Turing Year is over.  As it does, he will increasingly be claimed by LGBT groups wanting to explicitly include him in the pantheon of heroes whose achievements simultaneously:

• help break down stereotypes about who and what LGBT people are, and
• inspire pride in LGBT youth and give them a sense of a belonging to a long-standing, richly varied, and valuable set of communities.

This is both natural and inevitable.  Have those who share his nationality been any less anxious to claim him than those who share his sexuality? It is also, I would argue, desirable.    Nevertheless, it is bound to make some people uncomfortable.

It is truly incredible how much social attitudes about homosexuality have changed since Turing’s time (despite continued prejudice), and they are bound to continue to evolve.  By being careful to preserve the gayness in Turing’s legacy we can help that evolution along.  It’s true that it’s difficult to argue with ingrained prejudice, but it’s also difficult to argue with Turing’s record of contribution or the fact that his contributions could have continued for many years but for the senseless criminalization of his sex life.

Good Night, Sweet Prince

Days to Centenary: 245

Today’s video is outstanding — simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious. Ignore the video quality (it’s clearly a digitized videotape) — watch it!

Why?  Because even if you know plenty about Alan Turing’s wartime work, which is estimated to have shortened the war by several years (and perhaps even won it), and even if you know about him as the genius father of the computer and artificial intelligence, you can read about him and study him quite a bit without ever seeing certain of his traits as a man that are as impressive as anything he did militarily or intellectually.

This fragment of a documentary recounts the events leading up to Turing’s death, but in doing so it manages to highlight his wit, his poetic flourishes, and his incredible good humour, all of which appear to have persisted right up to the point where he ate the poison apple.

Behind the interview subjects, coming through in their anecdotes and their obvious love for him, you can almost see Turing himself: worrying, working, loving, and cackling with laughter (there’s a reason I chose a picture of Turing smiling, on the verge of laughter, to illustrate this site).

So, impressive trait number one:  he was a good-humoured and almost absurdly nice guy, even when persecuted, even when the chemical castration that was forced upon him made him sprout breasts.

Beyond his pleasan good nature, Turing also refused to lie about being gay in virtually all circumstances.  Certainly he didn’t advertise it (given that it was illegal), but by all accounts he was nontheless truthful about it, even (as we see here) when asked about it by police.

As hard as it can be to be honest about one’s sexuality even in 21st century Britain or America — especially in certain milieus, like corporate heirarchies or the military — I can’t quite imagine what it must have taken to live like that in the Britain of the 1940s and early 1950s, although the phrase “cojones of titanium” comes to mind.

So, impressive trait number two: even if a homophobic society sometimes depressed him, or even scared him, he refused to be cowed by it.

Unlike Turing’s achievements, these qualities — his good nature and his refusal to submit — are not unique to him.  These are characteristics that he shares with many LGBT folks (and members of other oppressed groups) throughout history, both great and ordinary.  But that doesn’t diminish these aspects of his personality.  What it does is include him in the long line of people who refused to allow the attitudes of others toward their orientation (or their sex, or their skin colour, or their religion) to stop them from getting on with their lives with pride, humour, love (and lust), and dignity.

If Turing’s intellectual achievements show us that he was an exceptional man, these other qualities show us that he was also a great example of the best in all men.

Two quick notes to give context to the video, then it’s time to watch:

Note one: Not everyone who’s interviewed is identified.  The jaunty fellow in the bowtie at the beginning is Norman Routledge, who was featured in a previous post.  Here we actually see and hear him reading the letter mentioned in that post, in which Turing announces that he’ll soon be pleading guilty to having had gay sex with a lover.  The letter ends with Turing’s worry that the following terrible syllogism would find support once he was publicly identified as gay:

• Turing believes machines think
• Turing lies with men
• Therefore machines do not think

Note two:  The guy in the black leather jacket and moustache is Andrew Hodges, the outstanding biographer who has done so much to help resurrect Turing’s life and work and to rehabilitate his reputation in the mind of the general public after it was buried under secrecy, scandal, and ugly prejudice.  Hodges now serves on the Alan Turing Year Advisory Committee and maintains several web sites related to Turing, gay rights, and Hodges’ own work in physics.

Okay, enough from me — just watch.

Turing’s Legacy – Art: Turing Inspires the Godfather of Pop Art

Days to Centenary: 251

On a Sunday (like today) most of us who can do so like to take a break from the workaday world and, if we’re really lucky, from other mundane quotidian concerns like cleaning and shopping, to engage with life’s larger context. Some people like to get out into nature, while others like to engage in spiritual contemplation. For me there’s nothing like allowing myself to be absorbed in the arts.

Whether I watch a film, immerse myself in a book, or visit a gallery or museum, it removes me from the pettier issues of day to day life and reminds me that life can be awesome, both in the slang sense of that word (really cool, like, say the movie Inception) and in the more traditional sense (inspiring genuine awe, for instance reading William Blake and lingering over his art), sometimes at the same time (the movie Lawrence of Arabia or T.E. Lawrence’s book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, take your pick).

All of which is a long way of bringing this blog back to the subject of Alan Turing and the arts. I’ve previously touched on the subject of sculpture, in a post on the Turing-inspired work in Guildford, and film, in the post that not only revealed (along with about a thousand tweets from everyone and their brother) that a script based on Turing’s life had been sold to Warner Brothers, but also reminded the world (on this point without any company that I’m aware of) that there was already a Turing-inspired movie with the title The Imitation Game, albeit one that is only eight minutes long (see the embedded video in the link above). And I’ll no doubt return to the arts given that there are more than 250 days left until the centenary and I still haven’t talked about the most prominent stage/screen adaptation of Turing’s life to date.

Today I want to direct your attention to the visual arts and the work of Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, who produced a series of eight images based upon or relating to the life of Alan Turing. These aren’t illustrations as such, but Turing-inspired works of imagination in a somewhat schematic pop art style (schematic here being descriptive, not pejorative), which is not surprising considering that Paolozzi is widely considered the godfather of pop art and created an image that is acknowledged to be the first true example of that form, I Was a Rich Man’s Plaything (which actually incorporates the word “pop”), below.

I Was a Rich Man's Plaything, Eduardo Paolozzi (1952), Collage mounted on card support: 359 x 238 mm, Tate Collection

Paolozzi was also a founding member of the Independent Group, an assortment of artists (in various media) and critics who, among other things, are sometimes credited with introducing mass cultural objects into high art, although I would say they expanded rather than introduced this trend, given earlier work by Dadaists and Surrealists.

Paolozzi’s Turing images incorporate brightly coloured shapes, some distinguishable as objects and some not (and some seeming to be at first, but turning out on closer inspection not to be), surrounded in the border by text that appears to be from Turing’s own work. Here are two examples.

Turing Image by Paolozzi

Turing Image by Paolozzi

As you can see, the images range from the relatively rectilinear and mechanical (first image) to flowing shapes reminiscent of Peter Max and the animations in Yellow Submarine (the second image).

Here is an instance — as has arisen many times before and surely will many times again — where an artist has been drawn into Turing’s world. A combination of scientific genius, inestimable military service (that happens also to serve the better instincts of humanity by assisting in a victory over an evil ideology), and human drama will do that to you.

You can find commentary on the Paolozzi images on this page from Andrew Hodges’ excellent site. If you’re of a mind to, you can buy prints of thePaolozzi Turing images from Print Editions here.)

Podcasting Alan Turing, Review #1: TechStuff’s “Spotlight On Alan Turing”

Days to Centenary: 263

This is the first in a series of reviews of podcasts available for free through iTunes that relate to Alan Turing. It’s my intention to review all such podcasts on this site before the centenary arrives. At the moment that seems ambitious but reasonable, but it’s likely that there will be new material posted as the centenary approaches -though how much, and how quickly it will appear is anyone’s guess – so we’ll see. If it turns out that there’s so much that I can’t keep up, well, that would be a very agreeable reason to fail.

Source: TechStuff

Title: Spotlight on Alan Turing

Running Time: 36:33

Format: Audio only

Sound Quality: Excellent

Available here.

TechStuff is an enjoyable podcast series from HowStuffWorks.com with topics such as the history of Texas Instruments, Ada Lovelace, space elevators, and digital theft. In one episode designed especially for a NASA geek like me, the hosts review what each member of NASA Mission Control does during a mission (circa the space shuttle).

TechStuff podcast logo

Like all TechStuff shows, the Turing episode is chatty, non-technical, and informal, and is clearly directed at the general listener of reasonable intelligence who has no prior knowledge of the topic at hand. The information in this episode is largely drawn from Andrew Hodges’ book Alan Turing: The Enigma, Hodges’ Alan Turing web site, and the Alan Turing entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

This podcast is a fun, informative general introduction to Alan Turing for anyone who has not yet encountered his life and legacy, which is why I have made it the subject of the first podcast review. It includes a brief overview of Turing’s life, work, and ideas, his involvment in athletics, his wartime work, his sexuality (including his attitude toward it and its ultimate consequences in the context of 1950s Britain), and his death.

The show contains only one error that I noticed, though this is quickly corrected: one host first states that Turing committed suicide by taking cyanide pills, but the other immediately substitutes an accurate account of the cyanide apple that killed him. If anyone listens to the show and notices any other factual issues, write me at nas@homoartificialis.com and I’ll post a note on this site.

I have no hesitation  recommending this show to anyone who wants a pleasant, accurate introduction to the basics of Alan Turing’s life.

The Definitive Turing Biography: “Alan Turing: The Enigma” by Andrew Hodges

Days to Centenary: 264

Andrew Hodges was uniquely qualified to write a biography of Alan Turing on at least three counts.  First, he is a professor at Wadham College, Oxford, working in the mathematics of theoretical physics.  Second, he is a gay man who has been working for gay rights since the early 1970s.  Third, he is a diligent researcher and an excellent writer.

Hodges turns all of these elements to his advantage (and to ours) in his definitive biography of Turing, Alan Turing: The Enigma.  His book is in-depth without ever having its pace flag, presents its mathematical perspective in a way that is comprehensible to non-mathematicians, details Turing’s involvement in World War II codebreaking with the drama it deserves, and presents Turing’s life and death (including, but not limited to, his orientation) with great humanity.

Alan Turing: The Enigma

I first read Enigma in the early 1990s and have returned to it periodically ever since.  My only complaint — not directed at Hodges, but at his publisher — is that there does not appear to be an ebook edition available yet.

Hodges also maintains an Alan Turing web site.  The link for it is always available in the Blogroll.

Note:  This post is far skimpier than Hodges’ book deserves.  At the moment I am not in an English-speaking country, making it hard to get a copy (I keep buying them and then, when I get in a proselytizing mood, giving them away to people).  As I mentioned above, there is no ebook as yet, so dead tree is the only way to go and it would take forever and cost a small fortune to ship it here.  I can’t write a full post or reference specifics without the book in hand and at the same time I can’t just remain silent on the topic given the book’s place in reviving Turing’s reputation and given Hodges’ wider role in the Alan Turing Year — that would just be too weird.  So consider this post a place-holder until later this year or early  in 2012, by which point I should own a copy of the book again, my third or fourth.  I promise not to give it away this time.