Just Before Christmas, Alan Turing finally gets pardon for being Gay!
Last year about this time, a pardon was given to the man whose code breaking prowess helped the Allies outfox the Nazis, whose theories laid the foundation for the computer age, and whose work on artificial intelligence has led to why it may now be true that machines can think. That man was convicted of being gay, forced to take sex hormones and committed suicide.
Turing was one of the 20th century’s giants. Without his codebreaking genius, the Nazis very likely would have succeeded in starving Britain. As the designer of the world’s first computer, he is rightly considered the father of the Computer Age. But in stuffy British minds, a gay man couldn’t possibly be a patriot, no matter what his accomplishments were. Not too shocking, really, from the same country that gave the world Margaret Thatcher.