Great post, thanks, Donna

Edward G Nilges — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 01:26:53 -0800

I wrote a letter to the editor of COMPUTERWORLD in 1972, asking why Turing got no credit: I didn't realize that his reputation as a "homosexual" had obscured his achievement.

It is hard to imagine just how feared homosexuality was in the 1950s. Basically, my father, who as an upper-middle class physician, both refused to wear Harry Trumanesque goomba shirts and forced my Mom to wear high heels, gloves, a hat, and a dress every day of her life, because, I think, he feared being outed as gay, which he wasn't.

He spoke to me recently of how my Mom looked up to him as a real guy, who'd served in the Army, but unlike the guys who grabbed her when she and her fellow nurses served in the USO. My Mom liked the fact that my father knew opera and would take her on dates to museums, a cheap date in the 1940s.

To me my father represented a solution to the equation of being a guy and being half-civilized.

But because my father couldn't talk about these issues, and because I inherited my Mom's willowy frame, my father was always scared that I was queer. This created alienation and bad feeling that lasts until today, because I felt people shouldn't be labeled. Plus I am not gay, just happy now and then :-).

There was a fashion in the 1970s for outing famous figures. I feel we're all a little bit bisexual, and that creative, intelligent people a little bit more.

Certainly, I encountered anti-gay sexual politics in MIS. The very idea of the geek codes the geek as the feminine/queer term in a relationship to the "real" MANager.

Simple software quality and reliability is re-presented, in the politics, as "frills" with the implication that the software designer not concerned, like a real Man, with the essentials of "business" alone wears mesh bikini shorts underneath his sober Gap attire.

The very idea of the Turing machine is gay-subversive, for it deconstructs the phallic competition of the "powerful" system, which systematically confuses information with the conversion of energy that occurs in that quintessentially male device, the car, with the textual, writerly, and therefore suspect activity of code.

The Enigma of Alan Turing

Donna L Davis — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:06:22 -0800

A review of The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer by David Leavitt. Leavitt's biography regales readers with back story, including idiosyncrasies and horror stories associated not only with Turing, but some of his contemporaries.

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Great post, thanks, Donna

The Enigma of Alan Turing