Michelle Taylor

I never got around to talking about the other two things that D and I saw that week, Breaking the Code or Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein.

Breaking the Code is a play that D had seen a TV movie version of (starring Derek Jacobi, that sounds amazing) of a book he's also read and considers the best biography of Alan Turing. D knows quite a lot more about Turing than I do, so I consider this high praise. My knowledge is more on the did-the-walking-tour that that guy (Ed something?) does around "Turing's Manchester," I've seen his mug chained to the radiator at Bletchley Park and for the afternoon I was there I did understand how the bombe worked but I've forgotten again now...and of course I know the tragic ending to his story that queers absorb: prosecution, chemical castration, suicide. I was really enjoying the walking tour until I remembered that bit was coming up at the end...

Anyway, I really enjoyed the play. I liked the epilogue that has been added to it, where a modern-day pupil at the school Turing went to is doing a presentation or something about him for LGBT History Month, which adds his pardon and a little more context to what's otherwise an utterly pointless loss of life. This life also happened to be really important to the second world war, but I am always mindful of how many ordinary lives were diminished in similar ways. I do think that having to be secretive about what he did during the war, even afterward, does offer a sad parallel to his isolation.

The play is set during his time in Manchester, with flashbacks to school and Bletchley and everything and I've no idea how true to life this is but in the play anyway he's wistful about his time at Bletchley, seeing it as a period of freedom, getting to be himself -- he's played with a very autistic affect and a stammer that can be severe, he could be weird and queer and chain his mug to the radiator and he could get away with whatever he wanted because his brain was so important to the war effort.

"Breaking the code" at first seemed an odd name for the play because breaking the code is exactly what -- D taught me -- Turing did not do; three Polish cryptologists did. (Turing developed optimizations to their methods, and created an electromechanical computer which allowed Enigma to be brute-forced much faster. He was a genius and deserves to be recognised as such. But he was part of a team at Bletchley who were building on Polish work, and Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski deserve recognition along with the French spy Hans-Thilo Schmidt and many others.) But of course the phrase can also of course to social codes, which included compulsory heterosexuality. When Turing reports a burglary to the police and in the process tells them he has broken the law -- "gross indecency" -- they have to act on that; he has broken a part of the legal code.

The other metric that D judges a biography of Alan Turing on is whether it says he invented the computer -- he didn't, or if he did it depends on what you mean by "computer" and for that matter "invent" -- and the play could probably have done better at that but it didn't feel egregiously inaccurate either. Turing does at one point say something like "we won the war because of me," but of course saying it doesn't make it so, and he says it to his "bit of rough picked up from the Oxford Road" as the police officer describes the young man, so the possibility of exaggeration to impress (or dismiss?) seems plausible.

Finally in a thing that probably only I noticed, near the end of the play when Turing has met up with an old Bletchley friend, who's now a wife and mother, and he's now infamous for his gay crime. So they have a lot to catch up on. At one point Turing is explaining about his "chemical castration," which was the option he took to avoid prison. I'd known about this, but I'd somehow never until this moment considered that what he'd been given was of course estrogen. They gave him dysphoria, I thought. What an awful thing to do to anybody. Anyway, the thing I noticed is that when Turing tells his friend in his matter-of-fact tone "I'm growing breasts!" all around the auditorium there was a chuckle from the white, older audience who like D and I were spending our Halloween at t the theater. I didn't laugh. Turing cheerfully went on to say something like "No one knows what'll happen to them when I stop getting the injections, if they'll go away or what!" Sitting there, seventy-one years later and a short walk from the stop where we'd gotten off the bus, which I just learned is where he met his "bit of rough from the Oxford Road" as the police officer in the play describes his lover, and a chest flattened with modern compression fabric, I winced. No. If only they just went away again... I was disappointed but not surprised at the room full of respectable theatergoers laughing at this. (The idea that taking estrogen would make someone less horny seemed much more amusing to me, but that's based on knowing so many trans women, and they are of course women and not men who are being punished.)

Oh wait, one other me-specific thing: in the play, Turing's mother did not accept that her son had died by suicide. It reminded me of my own mom, who was outraged when asked by police if my brother might have crashed his car intentionally. I understood that they have to ask but she was livid at the question. Maybe some mothers are just always going to be. You think you know your son so well, maybe better than anyone else, and then it turns out that no one gets to know him any more. I saw this play the day when I'd had that dream about being called my brother's brother so maybe that's why I thought of this.