The statue of Alan Turing in Whitworth Gardens in Manchester presents a poignant portrait. It lies between the University & Canal Street – Manchester’s ‘gay quarter’ – so it is not unusual to see visitors who have clearly come to pay homage to a man who has been adopted as an iconic victim of homophobia.
Ben Macintyre, in his column in Friday’s Times, pointed out that, during the war years at Bletchley Park, ‘his homosexuality was not merely tolerated, but regarded as irrelevant’. In fact all sorts of idiosyncratic, eccentric, or mad behaviours were tolerated in those whose genius & talents, unfettered, can work wonders, in this case in the breaking of enemy codes. Things changed after the War.
I knew, from my student days, that part of Turing’s punishment for ‘acts of gross indecency’ was that he was made to take drugs which would, supposedly, cure him of his unnatural urges. It was commonly supposed that the shame of all this made him take his own life by eating an apple laced with cyanide.
But, during a recent radio discussion to mark the centenary of Turing’s birth, a contributor casually described this as ‘He was made to take oestrogen’ & I went cold.
My own experience with HRT (following major surgery) was not entirely happy; of course in a situation like that it is not possible to attribute all changes to the drug, but when I mentioned to one doctor that it seemed to have changed the way my brain worked, the response was ‘Oh, everybody knows there are oestrogen receptors in the brain.'
I certainly experienced a certain loss in the attraction of spending time engaged in analytical, logical thinking & acquired an unexpected creative, artistic bent, when my head, even waking up in the morning, was filled with visual images. All this disappeared as soon as I stopped the HRT & things sort of returned to normal.
I am certainly not trying to make any crass, over-simplistic distinction between left brain/right brain, Mars & Venus, or to suggest that the (relative) lack of female mathematical genii can be explained by hormones.
What could be devastating is a sudden change, or a change between relative & absolute levels of the varius forms of oestrogen & testosterone, depending on the dosage & the method of delivery.
And that is what makes me go cold – imagining (with my empathy sharpened by reading Uncle Petros) the devastation & despair that a man like Turing might feel if he found his analytical brain simply ceased to function in the way that he was used to.
It makes the otherwise remarkably cheerful & sanguine passage, in the letter Turing wrote to his friend Norman Routledge, prescient in a way nobody could have imagined.
I've now got myself into the kind of trouble that I have always considered to be quite a possibility for me, though I have usually rated it at about 10:1 against. I shall shortly be pleading guilty to a charge of sexual offences with a young man. The story of how it all came to be found out is a long and fascinating one, which I shall have to make into a short story one day, but haven't the time to tell you now. No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I've not found out.
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Picture of Turing statue © Copyright Stephen Richards and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence
