Newly-published letters reveal Alan Turing's sexuality struggle

His tragic story was the subject of last year’s BAFTA-winning drama film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, but now a series of newly-published letters are offering a heart-rending insight into the mind of Alan Turing.

Six decades after Turing’s suicide at the age of 41, three letters released by his nephew and published in The Guardian reveal how the WWII codebreaker longed for a serious relationship, and continued to struggle with his sexuality after his ‘gross indecency’ conviction and subsequent chemical castration in 1952.

The hormone treatment was designed to suppress homosexual urges, but in a letter dated after his conviction he tells a friend: “I have had a dream indicating rather clearly that I am on the way to being hetero, though I don’t accept it with much enthusiasm either awake or in the dreams.”

He writes: “Mother has been staying here, and we seem to be getting on a good deal better. I have been subjecting her to a good deal of sexual enlightenment and she seems to have stood up to it very well.

“There was a rather absurd dream I had the other night in which I asked mother’s opinion about going to bed with some men and she said: ‘Oh very well, but don’t go walking about the place naked like you did before.’”

He also divulged plans for a holiday in a French-run camp in Corfu. “I expect to lie in the sun, talk French and modern Greek, and make love, though the sex and nationality… has yet to be decided: in fact it is quite possible that this item will be altogether omitted.

“I want a permanent relationship and I might feel inclined to reject anything which of its nature could not be permanent.”

Turing – who was officially pardoned by the Queen in 2013 – was awarded with a posthumous Attitude Award the same year. Watch his niece Janet accept the tribute below:

Newly-published letters reveal Alan Turing’s sexuality struggle

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