By Kavi Nielsen - May 13, 2026
Alan Turing was a genius, ripped apart and cannibalized by society. He cracked the German enigma code and was considered the founding father of AI and cognitive science, and if the world was a better place, he would have been able to see how all of his contributions worked out. However, homophobia exists, and therefore, Turing died at the age of 41. He is a true queer icon and also one of the saddest stories ever, and we must honor him by learning about him, since we failed at following in his footsteps and being good at math (unless you are good at math. If so, congratulations. Alan Turing would be so proud).
Turing was born on July 12th, 1912 in London, and died on June 7th, 1954 in Wilmslow, Cheshire. He studied math at Cambridge in 1931 and graduated in 1934, then joined the Government Code and Cipher School in 1938. Because of WWII, Turing moved to wartime headquarters in Bletchley Park in 1939. There, he eventually cracked the enigma code, which was a German cipher machine used to intercept radio messages.
In 1932, Polish mathematicians created the Bomba, a machine that decoded the internal writing system of the Enigma, but it relied on the consistency of German operating systems, so when they changed in 1940, it rendered the Bomba useless. In 1939-1940, Turing and other mathematicians made the Bombe, which was similar to the Bomba, but worked very differently. Using this, the codebreakers were able to intercept around 3900 messages per month by 1942, which eventually led to 8400 messages a month. Because of his achievements, Turing was made Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for his work.
In 1945, Turing designed a computer model, the automatic computing engine, which would have had the biggest computer memory of its time, had it been built. However, his colleagues were lazy and didn’t understand his genius, and they said it would be too hard to build, so they built a smaller one instead. He also developed the Turing test, which was used to test whether AI was thinking. In 2022, we began to question whether Chat GPT actually passed the Turing test. We have failed him yet again.
However, this was not the greatest failure to Turing. The greatest failure was the fact that the government put him on “hormonal therapy” for being gay.
Turing met his first love, Christopher Morcom, at school, though he died at 17. During the war, he was engaged to Joan Clarke, but when their engagement was reconsidered after the war ended, he revealed his sexuality and called off the wedding. Clarke was supposedly chill about this.
Turing was very open and unashamed about his sexuality. All his colleagues knew he was gay and also supposedly didn’t care. However, when one of his partners was robbed, Turing accidentally revealed his sexuality to the police, and they were unsuprisingly not chill. They called his sexuality a “gross indecency,” and since being gay was still illegal in Britain until 1967 (only 13 years after his death), he was given the choice of jail or “hormonal therapy” designed to lower his libido. Why this was considered a good idea will never be known. His sexuality was also put on his criminal record, barring him from continuing to work as a mathematician at most reputable places. The injections did lower his sex drive, but they also caused impotency, gynecomastia, and severe depression. Unsurprisingly, it did not make him less gay.
On June 8th, 1954, Turing was found dead in his room with a partially eaten apple. His death was caused by cyanide, which they found on the fruit. We are still unsure about the cause of death, but an official inquest ruled it as suicide. If you would like to make connections and also be sad, you may consider the side effects of the hormonal therapy, which had severe depression among them. You may also consider the effects of being criminalized for your sexuality, and then you may make your own conclusions on whether or not the government killed Turing, and then cry afterward.
The British government didn’t officially apologize for what they did to Turing until 2009, and his criminal conviction was not pardoned until 2013. If you are not mad about this, remember that Turing may have been able to see all the positive effects of his creations and live openly, but he died before he turned 50. In conclusion, this world does not deserve Alan Turing, who saved countless people in WWII, but was forced to undergo chemical castration by the government because he was gay. We must honor him now and remember him forever.
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