Was Alan Turing Gay? The 1952 Conviction, Chemical Castration and Pardon

The arrest and the 1952 trial

Manchester police arrested Alan Turing in February 1952 over his relationship with another man, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on him. Only a few years had passed since his cryptanalysis work at Bletchley Park during the war, told in the Recap on Alan Turing and the Enigma Machine. The episode belongs to the same postwar Britain that sits behind the Recap on World War 2: a country emerging from the conflict while still enforcing laws that criminalised consensual homosexual acts.

The charge was “gross indecency,” as the UK Ministry of Justice’s own announcement on GOV.UK also records. Turing was tried and convicted in 1952, the same year as the arrest: the Education Hub of the UK Department for Education confirms this too, in a page devoted to his legacy.

The sentence: prison or hormone treatment

The court set Turing a choice, not a single penalty. According to the Education Hub, Turing could choose between prison and probation, the latter conditional on a hormone treatment: injections of the female sex hormone oestrogen, which both the Education Hub and the Science Museum’s own blog in London call “chemical castration,” meant to switch off his sex drive. Turing chose the treatment, staying out of prison but undergoing the injections for the length of his probation.

Worked example: picture a contractor working under a classified government contract: a security clearance is the permit that lets them into restricted projects. Losing it doesn’t erase their degree or their skills, it means no classified project can give them a role anymore. That is what happened to Turing after the 1952 conviction, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: classified cryptologic work for the British state was closed to him.

Clearance revoked, and state surveillance

The conviction had a direct effect on Turing’s work. Following the sentence, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reports, he lost the ability to continue his classified cryptologic work for the British state: his security clearance, which had allowed it, was revoked.

Historian Andrew Hodges, cited by the Science Museum, puts three things side by side: the revoked clearance, how little the state trusted Turing by then, and the watch it kept on him. Together they may have weighed on the two years before his death, in 1954, though Hodges stops short of calling any one of them the cause. The Recap on mass surveillance and human rights frames that same tension between the state and the individual in broader terms.

Death in 1954

Turing died on 7 June 1954 at his home in Wilmslow, Cheshire, as both the Science Museum and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy report. The coroner, after an inquest, concluded it was suicide; according to the Science Museum, Turing himself had spoken of it before. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, however, that his death was generally a surprise: people close to him did not see him as someone on the verge of taking his own life.

The 2013 royal pardon and the 2017 law

In 2013 Queen Elizabeth II put her signature on a pardon covering Turing’s conviction, which took effect right away, according to the Education Hub. The Science Museum notes that a royal pardon is normally granted only to someone found innocent of a crime: Turing’s was an exception to that practice, secured through the Royal Prerogative of Mercy after a public campaign that drew support from tens of thousands of signatories.

The law known as Turing’s Law, part of the Policing and Crime Bill, received Royal Assent on 31 January 2017, according to the UK Ministry of Justice’s announcement on GOV.UK. That same day, a blanket posthumous pardon reached thousands of gay and bisexual men who had been convicted under sexual offences now abolished; the convictions concerned consensual homosexual acts. The same announcement gives no precise number of people involved; the UK Education Hub cites a figure of 75,000 elsewhere, but no primary source among those consulted confirms it. The principle behind those posthumous pardons touches a broader subject, the rights set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Turing is remembered today also as one of the founding figures of computing: the Recap on the history of computers traces that other strand of his legacy, distinct from the legal case told here.