On this day, 7 June 1954, British mathematician and pioneering thinker in the field of artificial intelligence Alan Turing died of cyanide poisoning at the age of 41. Turing had also helped the Allies win World War II by decoding encrypting Nazi communications, and after the war helped develop some of the earliest digital computers.
In 1952, he was convicted of “gross indecency” for homosexuality and sentenced to chemical castration by the state as punishment. His death was officially ruled a suicide, in response to the persecution he had been suffering.
However, the police investigation of his death was entirely inadequate. And while they concluded he deliberately ingested cyanide from an apple, they failed to test the apple for the presence of cyanide. Alternative explanations for his death were that he could have accidentally inhaled cyanide from an experiment, or that British security services killed him to prevent state secrets being passed on to the Soviet Union, which was a common fear held about LGBT+ people whom they typically considered a security risk.
Years of campaigning against the legacy of UK state homophobia eventually resulted in Turing receiving a posthumous pardon in 2013, as well as the passing of the so-called Turing’s Law, which granted posthumous pardons to nearly 50,000 other men convicted of “gross indecency” for same-sex relations.
This Pride month, learn more LGBT+ history in our podcast series: https://workingclasshistory.com/tag/lgbtq/ https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1444922225692923/?type=3