Galeano on Alan Turing

This video is part of a talk Eduardo Galeano gave in Los Angeles in June 2009; the text below is taken from his book Mirrors:

by Eduardo Galeano (via the Argentine Pirate Party)

For not being macho, a real macho, a man with hair on his chest, Alan Turing was condemned. He squealed, he squawked, he stuttered. He wore an old necktie as a belt. He slept little and went days without shaving, and he would run across cities from one end to the other while working out complicated mathematical formulas in his head.

Working for British intelligence a few years earlier, he had helped shorten the Second World War when he invented the machine capable of deciphering the indecipherable codes of the German military high command.

By then he had already imagined a prototype of an electronic computer and had laid the theoretical foundations of modern computer science. Later he led the construction of the first computer to run on stored programs. He played endless games of chess with it, asked it questions that drove it crazy, and demanded that it write him love letters.

The machine obeyed, putting out rather incoherent messages.

But it was flesh-and-blood policemen who took him away in 1952, in Manchester, for gross indecency.

Put on trial, Turing pleaded guilty to homosexuality.

To be set free, he agreed to undergo a treatment to cure him.

The bombardment of drugs left him impotent. He grew breasts. He shut himself in. He no longer went to the university. He heard whispers, he felt stares shooting him in the back.

Before going to sleep, as was his habit, he would eat an apple.

One night, he injected cyanide into the apple he was about to eat.