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The Indoctrination Game: Alan Turing as Gay Martyr

By Walter Donway

January 22, 2015

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It is true that Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who helped to crack the German Enigma code, a crucial step in the Allied victory over the Nazis in WWII, was homosexual. And it is true that only half-a-decade after the Allied victory, which he helped to speed, Turing was tried for “gross indecency”—homosexual activity—convicted, and forced to undergo “chemical castration” as an alternative to prison. And it is true, as the British belatedly realized, all the way up to the office of the prime minister and Queen Elizabeth II, that never has so great a benefactor, who saved so many lives, been treated so shabbily by his countrymen.

The result is a movie that swept me into its world, kept me in agony about its (well-known) outcome, and left me in tears in the darkened theater.

This is a “made for cinema story,” and this season’s biggest box-office hit, “The Imitation Game” (Oscar nominations across the board) takes full advantage of that. The result is a movie that swept me into its world, kept me in agony about its (well-known) outcome, and left me in tears in the darkened theater. The Alan Turing of “The Imitation Game” is a hero, even if we are honest about his motives. Was he driven above all by patriotism, an obsession with saving his country and its men at arms? By the premises of the movie, and the psychology of great scientific discovery—the way genius in mathematics manifests itself—the answer is no. The Enigma code was the toughest puzzle then going and breaking it the most exhilarating challenge to mathematics, to pure intellect. Turing is a hero by virtue of his dedication to his values, his highest goals, which were to probe the secrets of nature by means of mathematics. And that in no sense imputes his patriotism.

“The Imitation Game” is a great story about a heroic era in British life, and life of the free world, and to tell it in all its glory is the job of books (Alan Turing: The Enigma, by Andrew Hodges) and film (Graham Moore’s screenplay based on the book). But Alan Turing’s life, the work at Bletchley Park that broke Enigma, the other people in Turing’s life, and his shocking treatment by his countrymen also are history. And not obscure history; some relatives and colleagues of Turing are still alive and many histories have been written about every aspect of the work at Bletchley Park.

It is not on record, at least not obviously, that Andrew Hodges is gay, or an advocate for gays, but his first book, With Downcast Gays: Aspects of Homosexual Self-Oppression, was published six years before his book on Turing. His only other book is on number theory. But even Hodges has criticized the movie for a distorted emphasis on Turing’s homosexual conflicts. (Note: Spoilers ahead)

And so the question: Is the movie, “The Imitation Game,” justified in the name of artistic license in turning the life of Alan Turing into a morality play about a great gay martyr? Because that is what this movie is. Its three grand “movements” are Turing’s years at boarding school, where he falls in love with an older boy, Christopher, who dies; Turing’s years at Bletchley, where he proposes marriage to the only woman on his team in an agony of conflict over his homosexuality; and Turing’s postwar years, where he is convicted for “gross indecency” and accepts chemical castration in preference to incarceration, but then commits suicide. It is undoubtedly true that in the second and major “movement” of the movie—the race to crack Enigma and the obstacles of official skepticism, the race against war deaths, and the cheering triumphant success—is dramatic gold. But in each movement, the movie’s continuing and uniting theme, the thread and the payoff—the explanatory power and the emotional culmination—are Turing’s martyrdom for his homosexuality.

Well, was that the story? Is it a true bill?

The best answer to that is to ask: To what extent did the movie makers have to depart from the truth of Turing’s life–his personality, his achievement, his actions and choices, and his fate—to carry off “The Imitation Game” as a tale of homosexual tragedy? The answer is: They had to play very fast and loose with the truth, as historians present it, to distort the narrative at every turn into one of homosexual martyrdom.

For example, arguably, the true hero of the film is “Christopher,” the crude, ramshackle first prototype of the computer created by Turing and his colleagues to reverse-process the Enigma signals and read them—and so seize the key to the plans of Hitler’s high command right to the end of the war. “Christopher” was the boy upon whom Turing supposedly had a crush in boarding school.

But in truth the machine was not called “Christopher.” That is used to imply that Turing’s boyhood love provided the drive and determination to crack Enigma. Later, faced with prison, Turing weeps that he cannot be separated from the computer, from Christopher. But the machine was called the “bombe,” the name given by the three Polish cryptographers who, as early as 1932, cracked Enigma by building a decoding machine, which they gave to the British. (By WWII, however, the Germans had greatly increased the complexity of Enigma, essentially an electro-mechanical machine for creating multi-alphabetic substitution codes by random turns of rotors with the alphabet on each one.) The successful Bletchley version was called “Victory.”

In the film, Turing is portrayed as socially frozen and inept, and, in fact, depicted as having Asperger’s Syndrome, on the autism spectrum: socially inept, remote, humorless. This greatly enforces the suggestion of social isolation supposedly linked to his homosexuality; he is portrayed as a stuttering, stumbling, blushing social basket case. Is this legitimate film making, in the name of explaining his homosexuality? Because colleagues who knew him reported regularly and consistently that, although in some ways eccentric, Turing had many friends, a sense of humor, and a good working relationship with colleagues. After being graduated from Oxford with a first in mathematics, Turing got himself over to America, to a Ph.D  program at Princeton University, where he became deeply involved in experimental work and earned the doctorate. Leaving Oxford and the colleagues and friends he knew there to move to America does not suggest emotional problems with adapting to new settings and new people.

Movie scenes about Turing’s school days and his friend, Christopher, and their relationship, are rejected by those who knew Turing. And yet, they are essential in building up the image of the lonely, rejected little boy with a different sexual orientation. One wonders how much Turing, as an ardent Marathoner and long-distance bicyclist, and in all photographs a very husky young man, was pushed around by other students.

The detective in the film who arrests Turing in 1951 on suspicion of being a Soviet spy is a fiction. No such detective, no suspicion of spying, no interview where Turing tells his real story. Turing was arrested in 1952 for “gross indecency” after a robbery at his house that implicated a young man who was his lover.

Turing did agree to take a drug to induce chemical castration, but it did not make him weak or unable to think, although it had other biological effects; in fact, it turned him to investigation of mathematical biology to understand what was happening to him. His response was robust, indomitable, and unperturbed—the real Turing—though I do not for one moment want to downplay the almost unbelievable treatment of Turing just a few short years after the war in which he was a national hero (and awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1945 by King George VI).

Miss Clarke’s visit to him, during his probation and “treatment,” emphasizing the sexual element, again, simply never occurred, according to historians. Although the two did keep in touch, after the war.

Oh, and none of that stuff with Stewart Menzies of the British Intelligence Service is known, in any record, to have occurred during the war. And so, there was no intelligence service manipulation of Turing. And that severe and awful Commander Denniston, making life hell for the sensitive and brilliant Turing? No record that they every interacted. Turing, already a name in mathematics, was always respected and considered one of the best code-breakers at Bletchley.

Oh, and that colleague of Turing’s who was a Soviet spy? Writing in the Guardian, British historian Alex von Tunzelmann is irate at this subplot, which implies that Turing was blackmailed into not exposing John Cairncross as a spy lest Cairncross expose Turing’s homosexuality. She writes: “This is wholly imaginary and deeply offensive–for concealing a spy would have been an extremely serious matter. Were the makers of The Imitation Game intending to accuse Alan Turing, one of Britain’s greatest war heroes, of cowardice and treason? Creative license is one thing, but slandering a great man’s reputation–while buying into the nasty 1950s prejudice that gay men automatically constituted a security risk–is quite another.” But hey, it fits into the homosexual martyr theme, right?

Tunzelmann draws a broad and painful conclusion: “Historically, The Imitation Game is as much of a garbled mess as a heap of unbroken code. For its appalling suggestion that Alan Turing might have covered up for a Soviet spy, it must be sent straight to the bottom of the class.”

The movie represents Turing as almost breaking down under stress of the conviction and grotesque legal “remedy” of injections with a synthetic estrogen to reduce his libido. The movie then ends and down the screen rolls the postscript that Turing committed suicide. Was it clear (certainly not to me) that Turing’s death came a year after the treatments had ceased? And that Turing is reported by those who knew him at the time to have taken his conviction and treatment “with good humour”? And did not lose his job, pushing ahead with research even on the mathematical biology of his “treatment”? And showed no signs of depression in the weeks before his death and died leaving a careful list of tasks he would complete when returning to his office?

Turing did die of cyanide poisoning, but his colleague, a philosophy professor, reported he was using the cyanide in some of his work and that evidence cited by the coroner was more consistent with death by inhalation than death by ingestion.

And so where are we left? If an artist, a novelist, or film maker, wishes to borrow and build upon the achievements and fame of a real historical person, such as Alan Turing, is there then “artistic license” to make up events, major psychological and personality traits, and important relationships that never existed—and that the record states did not exist—for the sake of art? Do the demands of art supersede respect for the reputation of real historical persons? Can we make up the story and yet stand on the shoulders of the real man—and end our film, as does “The Imitation Game”—with a recitation of real historical events that suit our theme—such as the royal pardon granted to Turing in 2013 by Queen Elizabeth?

If you are going to make it up, why make it up about Alan Turing? Not that it matters, now, but I wonder if the “real” Alan Turing would appreciate the depiction of his life as a melodrama of homosexual tragedy?

Is playing fast and loose with history, and the facts of the life of a man—in this case, a hero—justified in the name of propaganda?

And is playing fast and loose with history, and the facts of the life of a man—in this case, a hero—justified in the name of propaganda? Is portraying the life of the real Alan Turing, his colleagues, and his achievements no different than creating a beautiful, moving, and important fiction like “Brokeback Mountain?” You can make it all up?  Because you wish to steal Turing’s personal greatness, achievement, and role in history for use in your propaganda? For a cause that you feel somehow makes it all “true”?

Not if you  believe, as I do, in protecting freedom of adult sexual choices,  if you cry for the real Alan Turing, but are troubled by the distortion of history, and the perversion of art, to fuel propaganda.
 

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