In the 1950s, gay men travelled to liberal European cities in search of freedoms that were denied to them at home. Places where they could explore their sexuality, find companionship and immerse themselves in homosocial worlds beyond the reach of British convention.
Alan Turing was one of those men.
Quietly rebellious and ahead of his time, Turing was a man who mathematically questioned the laws of nature while his own nature was criminalised. Gay, sexually curious, hungry for connection and unafraid to demand that the people around him accept him for who he was. He wanted sex, he wanted love, and, beneath it all, he longed for a permanent relationship.
Turing’s Law shines a light on the Turing history has hidden in the shadows.
This is the story of two men spending an afternoon together in Greece. An encounter that becomes both sexual and intellectual and exposes attitudes that challenge the conventions of their time.
Alan is messy, unpredictable, charming, bold, funny, opinionated and provocative. He is not the stuttering, isolated mathematical stereotype who avoided human contact in favour of machines. Nor is he simply the polished wartime hero immortalised on the £50 note.
He is a real man: gay, complicated, contradictory and fiercely himself. The man who would become a national hero.
In a villa in Greece, Alan spends an afternoon with ‘Man’. Unable to reveal the classified knowledge of what he built during the war, he is forced to navigate a growing dissonance between what he knows and what he can say.
For a man who spent his life questioning rules, challenging authority and refusing to accept easy answers, Alan now finds himself caught on the horns of a dilemma.
What can he reveal? What must remain hidden? And what happens when the private man behind the national hero is finally given a voice?
Turing’s Law is the unspoken history of a national hero and an invitation to meet the man history has hidden.