Turing on Christoper Morcom:
"There was someone I knew at school someone who didn't at all approve of dirty talk. Once or twice I tried to shock him but it didn't work out. He didn't take the bait. He was just... above it. He made me want to be good."
"He was in a different house. And boys in different houses weren't meant to fraternise. So I could only see him on Wednesdays when we both happened to be in the library. He would make fun of me for my sloppy handwriting for mistakes I made... the careless errors.He made me want to improve my standards"
"I care about what I was in his eyes. More so, in a sense, than what I was in my own."
"I think if you find a person like that and I don't think everybody does find one, in fact, I think it's terribly rare. Then all you thought before, all your plans for yourself, you realise they were just filling a gap. It was just something for you to do while you were waiting for this person and everything you want to be is something for him, not yourself. There is a drawback however, finding such a person makes anybody else so ordinary and if anything happens to him, you've got nothing left but return to the ordinary world and a kind of isolation that never existed before." ( ⇦ ⇦ This is what we now call Soulmate, isn't it?)
"When i heard he was dead the world flatten suddenly to be so different i found ways to dragging him around with me to ease the transition I wrote to his mother a number of times. I made no secret of the power of my feelings. I told her I absolutely worshipped the ground on which he walked and she, being his mother, found no reason to quibble with this. We shared in the loss of him."
'During the last year I worked with him continually and I'm sure that I could not have found anywhere another companion so brilliant and yet so charming and unconceited. I regarded my interest in my Work as something to be shared With him and I think he felt a little the same about me. I know that I must put as much energy into my Work as if he were alive because that is what he would like me to do."
"My mother was very worried at the time because I insisted that Morcom was still with me, working with me, helping me. He was my companion and in some ways he was an even steadier companion after his death. I didn't want to frighten anyone, but I knew he was still there."
The presence of Christoper Morcom would stay with Turing for the rest of his life.
In March 1952 Turing was convicted of gross indecency. He become well enough known for he's become a public disgrace. The count gave him a choice, prison or a enforced body change.
Dr. Allan Pacey: What the count ordered was effectively to have Turing chemically castrated, that was to effectively remove his body of the male hormone testosterone.
Turing: Chemical castration they called it, very civilised. I take it every day and once a month I get tested in a hospital to make sure I don't have any of that naughty testosterone in my body. It's meant to cure me with my desires.（真是恩將仇報，還用這麼不堪的方式！）
David Leavitt: The arrest was I think is a turning point in his life because it was at that moment he understood how untrustworthy British society was. I think it was a demoralising experience and a embarrassing experience for him. And he was never the same afterwards.
Professor Simon Schaffer: I mean what's going on in the insupportable tragedy of Turing's faint, is what happens when deeply institutionalised English intellectuals encounter what life's like outside was, they forget and cannot imagine how vicious life can be.
Those are the words that struck me most while I was watching the programme. Alan Turing must be a romantic, from the way he loves Christoper Morcom and the way he killed himself, which was he poisoned an apple with cyanide so he could mimic the one in his favourite fairy-tale, Disney’s Snow White.
The British Government posthumously apologised to Alan Turing for prosecuting him as a homosexual.
Remarks of the Prime Minister Gordon Brown
10 September 2009
This has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude that characterise the British experience. Earlier this year, I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against fascism and declared the outbreak of the Second World War.
So I am both pleased and proud that thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship: that of code-breaker Alan Turing.
Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely.
In 1952, he was convicted of “gross indecency” – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.
Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time, and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair, and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I am and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and so many thousands of other gay men who were convicted, as he was convicted, under homophobic laws, were treated terribly. Over the years, millions more lived in fear of conviction. I am proud that those days are gone and that in the past 12 years this Government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality, and long overdue.
But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for this contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices – that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out European civilisation for hundreds of years.
It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present. So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work, I am very proud to say: we’re sorry. You deserved so much better.
Gordon Brown
Too little too late!
