‘A very camp environment’: why Alan Turing fatefully told police he was gay

Ubiquity of then-illegal relations at King's College, Cambridge, explains puzzling 1952 admission, says scholar

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.