Skip to main content

Pryce's Buoy by Alan Turing

Below is an AI summary. I typically write my own posts but I tripped across this news and wanted to post it "hot off the presses" as quickly as possible:

Alan Turing wrote a newly transcribed autobiographical story about homosexuality

Alan Turing's unpublished, semi-autobiographical short story titled "Pryce's Buoy" has been fully transcribed and analyzed for the first time. 
A literary analysis by Professor Sarah Dillon from the University of Cambridge was published in The Review of English Studies. The text provides a rare, direct look at how the legendary World War II codebreaker and computer scientist viewed his own homosexuality. 

The Plot: The six-page handwritten manuscript serves as an "autofictional" retelling of the late-1951 sexual encounter in Manchester that ultimately led to Turing’s 1952 arrest for "gross indecency". 

The Characters: Turing casts himself as "Alec Pryce," a celebrated scientist who has just completed an intense period of academic work. Pryce goes looking for fun and encounters "Ron Miller," a working-class young man looking to make money from sex (representing Turing's real-life lover, Arnold Murray). 

The Ending: The story is unfinished and breaks off abruptly mid-sentence during a scene where the two characters are at a restaurant, ending with the line, "Ron wouldn't.". 

Literary Influence: The transcription reveals that Turing was highly engaged with contemporary gay fiction, directly borrowing style elements and dialogue from Angus Wilson's 1952 social realism novel, Hemlock and After. 

Rewriting the "Tragic" Narrative
The discovery challenges the popular, modern Hollywood stereotype of Turing as a socially isolated, detached, and ashamed figure. According to University of Cambridge research, Turing's own writing paints a portrait of a man who was "playful, funny, cheeky," comfortable in his skin, and unapologetic about his sexuality. In the text, Turing even writes that his avatar, Alec, "always liked to parade his homosexuality... in suitable company.".

While portions of the scruffy manuscript had been briefly quoted by past biographers, the full text had sat largely unexamined in the archives of King's College, Cambridge, since Turing's death in 1954.


10 sites (sources) listed. I only bothered to include links for three, but this is the list of sites:



BBC

LGBTQ Nation

Q News Pty Ltd

StudyFinds

Nautilus | Science

Yahoo

The Times

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anger Management

I was molested and raped as a child. I spent my teens and twenties filled with anger. My therapist once said something like "How did I know you were angry? Maybe it was the flames shooting out your ears." He wasn't actually talking about me. He was describing someone else. But he could have been talking about me. I took up role playing gaming in my teens and my first character was a Red Sonja-esque character with long red tresses. She was a fighter mage and she had issues. Gaming was good for me. I made a lot of friends and they were mostly male and they were protective of me. I began to put down my baggage. At some point, I retired that first character because she was so angry and toxic and I wasn't anymore. Playing her required me to put back on the mantel of so much baggage that I had worked hard to put down and it wasn't good for me to keep that alive. In my late twenties, me and my husband bought a house and it was about thirty minutes from the ...
Read more

It's a rainy Friday morning here.

To my surprise, this blog already has a whopping four posts dated 2026. This will be the fifth post this year. I thought it was deader than that. I have a lot to say about a lot of topics. It's fueled a bunch of different blogs while I try desperately to both "find my voice" and figure out how to open my mouth in public without undue drama. I've spent years throwing things at a wall and seeing what works. I have several blogs that either gelled after multiple attempts to find my voice, like Native Influence that finally came together earlier this year after multiple tries that got redacted in whole or in part, or blogs that were the umpteenth attempt to make a blog about a concept, like Feminine Character Works replaced a project called Feminist Slacking. I also have a history of giving up on a project and declaring it DEAD, then finally writing buckets. That happened on Project SRO where I did a brain dump of unpolished stuff after announcing "I'm done an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Another think

And another reason to not REALLY be enthused about continuing to write here: I'm very very very against trying to "cure" people of being gay, but I suspect that some people who think they are gay are really attracted to people who have enough of something in common with them and they just aren't finding it in members of the opposite sex. Some chick on probably Reddit remarked once that she was beginning to worry she liked bad guys and then realized all the bad guys in movies she liked were played by the same actor. She liked that actor in any role he played, bad guy or not. During my divorce, I was involved with a man fourteen years older than me and about the time I was thinking "This is a shit show and I'm NEVER getting with an older man again." I met a guy sixteen years older than me and we really hit it off. I have B.A.G.G.A.G.E about my tendency to like older men. It took me a long time to sort that and not feel like me liking older men somehow was ...
Post a Comment
Read more