Brody's Notes... Is an apology truly enough Mister Prime Minister?

By Brody Levesque (Washington DC) Sept 14 | Last Thursday, in an unprecedented response to a public petition posted on the official government website of the British prime minister, which called for an apology to Alan Turing, Prime Minister Gordon Brown released this statement:

“2009 has been a year of deep reflection - a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ - in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence - and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison - was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate - by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices - that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.”

Now, that in and of itself is an impressive gesture, given the usual restraint shown by the PM's office on most matters relating to LGBT issues. However, there remains a definite lack of closure to that entire sorry episode and not only to Turing and his family but the countless others that were zealously persecuted by the Crown for only being guilty of the love that dared not be spoken of out-loud.

If the only so-called crime was Alan Turing's private love life, and since he so generously contributed in an immeasurable way in keeping Herr Hitler's Gestapo from taking over New Scotland Yard, should not a pardon be issued as well Mr. Prime Minister?

LGBT UK activist Peter Tatchell, (Web Page) thinks so. In an article published on Friday, Sept 11^th by Nicolas Chinardet, another prominent British LGBT activist, Chinardet, writing for Britain's pinknews said;

“Those who know how militant and political I can get may be surprised to hear that I did not sign the widely publicised petition for an official apology to Alan Turing.

Of course this campaign is in many ways a very positive thing. It brought a dark page of the history of the LGBT community to the forefront, making the wider public aware of what some of us (many still alive today, no doubt) have had to endure from their own country.

It also served to highlight the way LGBT people have been treated by historians simply because of their unorthodox sexual orientation; how they have been prevented from taking their rightful place in the history books and have instead been firmly kept into the historical closet, regardless of the scope of their achievements.

As news comes that Gordon Brown has taken the highly unusual step to actually grant the demanded apology, I can't help but wonder once again, as does Peter Tatchell (in a statement made today on the subject) and no doubt a few others, why Alan Turing should be singled out. Why should he be the only one deserving of an apology for the "utterly unfair" treatment he has received at the hand of the government of the time?

Tatchell, in his lukewarm praise of Brown's apology as "commendable", reminds us that an "estimated 100,000 British men [...] were also convicted of consenting, victimless same-sex relationships during the twentieth century". And then there were the others before that whose lives were destroyed (all too often literally) for who they were and who they loved.

And this brings the next question, that of the worth of an apology. This is not a new debate. It is a particularly heated one, for example, in the black community around the issue of slavery, where it is complicated by the question of financial reparations.

An apology is, of course, a potent symbol, but what is an apology by people who weren't involved to someone who is dead going to achieve? Especially when so many inequalities, humiliations and rebuffs are still visited on LGBT people today around the world. Indeed, at the same time that Brown was apologising to a British citizen for the treatment he received for his homosexuality, another British citizen was being killed in Jamaica for the exact same sorry reason.

Finally, let's not forget, at the risk of seeming ungrateful perhaps, that while the PM may have apologised, Turing is still officially a criminal. He and all the others should be pardoned, not solely apologised to. What are you going to do about Mr Brown? An apology is not enough.”

I especially am mindful of that last paragraph, “...Turing is still officially a criminal.”

Well Mister Prime Minister?