The Official Gays.com Blog

Last Friday, we were overjoyed to hear of British PM Gordon Brown’s posthumous apology to Alan Turing, the patron saint and godfather of gay geeks everywhere. If you haven’t heard of Alan Turing before, well let me tell you — he’s the guy you need to thank for the  computer that you have in front of you, and he’s also the guy that helped bring an end to World War II by breaking German Enigma codes. Unfortunately, this genius was convicted of being a homosexual and given castration by injection of female hormones — something which had the effect of humiliating him so much (it gave him breasts) that he eventually decided to take his own life by eating an apple laced with cyanide. [Note: Some Mac enthusiasts believe that the Apple logo with the colors of the rainbow all in the wrong order is a tribute to Alan Turing.]

Over the weekend, opinion pieces have come in fast and furious. There are those who believe that Gordon Brown’s apology is not enough — that Turing should also have been posthumously pardoned, along with all of the estimated 100,000 British men incarcerated for being gay. And then there are dickwads like Simon Heffer of The Daily Telegraph slamming the PM’s apology to a “dead homosexual” who did, after all “break the law as it stood” and for his “disgusting act” of “suck[ing] up to minorities such as homosexuals”.

As repugnant as we find the views of this epic douche, we do find ourselves wondering along with him how politicians today have become so good at apologising for events that they have no control over and for NOT apologising for things that happen under their watch. The best way Britain can magnify Turing’s memory is to prevent today’s Alan Turings from suffering the same fate. Here are just a few things that we’d like to bring to the PM’s attention:

• Gay people continue to be harrassed, imprisoned, raped, and killed in many of Britain’s former colonies across Asia and Africa, thanks in part to the legal cousins of Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 which live on in those territories (both Alan Turing and Oscar Wilde were convicted under this law). The most notable / notorious of these is Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code drawn up during Victorian times and replicated in almost all of Britain’s colonies in the Far East. While India has just recently read down the law in a landmark decision,  the ugly piece of Victorian legislation continues to live on in places like Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore. Just last week, gay British diplomat John Terry was murdered in Jamaica with a note attached to his body saying “This is what will happen to ALL gays”.
• There is a wave of LGBT refugees fleeing Iraq today due to the unprecedented levels of homophobic violence that has broken out since the US- and British-led invasion of Iraq. This is now a problem big enough that NGO’s like ORAM and Iraqi LGBT have been established to deal with the situation. Let me do a double take here: If not for the stupid Iraq war and all the lies we’ve been told, we wouldn’t be dealing with the term “LGBT refugee” today.
• Back home in the UK, same-sex marriage is still not legal (while civil partnerships are) and the current Labour government has no plans to change that. It is time to stop relegating gay people to the political back of the bus. Separate is NOT equal.