Why did Alan Turing 'out' himself? College culture at Cambridge may hold clue

Ubiquity of then-illegal gay relations at King's, Cambridge, sheds light on codebreaker's 1952 admission to police

- Donna Ferguson

For decades, it has puzzled historians. Why, in the course of reporting a burglary to the police in 1952, did the maths genius Alan Turing volunteer that he was in an illegal homosexual relationship? The admission enabled the police to prosecute the Bletchley Park codebreaker for "gross indecency", ending Turing's groundbreaking work for GCHQ on early computers and artificial intelligence and compelling him to undergo a chemical castration that rendered him impotent. Two years later, he killed himself.

Now, research by a University of Cambridge academic has shed light on the reasons why Turing, a former undergraduate and lecturer at King's College, Cambridge, did not hide his homosexuality from the police. “There was a whole community in King's quite different from stories one knows about from gay history, usually involving casual pickups and a lot of despair, hiding and misery,” said Simon Goldhill, professor of classics at the college.

His research has uncovered a “rather happy” community in the formerly all-male college at “the centre of the British establishment” while homosexuality was still illegal. “It was a very camp environment,” said Goldhill, who will talk at King's on Tuesday about his new book, Queer Cambridge. For example, in the 1930s, when Turing was at King's, “the provost [college principal] and many of the senior fellows [tutors] were openly and outwardly gay. They had sex with men and talked constantly about having sex with men.”