Guest Author - Barbara Sharpe

Today, being the anniversary of 9/11, is a day of reflection and remembering for many Americans, and others around the world.

In the United States, LGBT people are not allowed to openly serve their country in the military. There are those of us who are semi-out because they have a friendly commanding officer but their situations are tenuous. It’s sort of hard to go back “in” once you’ve been “out” and a change in commanding officers could be detrimental to a LGBT serviceperson’s career.

There are a number of LGBT people who have had a profound impact on military history. Not only in the United States but around the world.

Yesterday, Great Britain recognized the contributions and accomplishments of Alan Turing, a World War II code-breaker who was later convicted of “gross indecency” (read: being gay) and sentenced to chemical castration. Two years later, he took his own life.

Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of Great Britain, released a statement today. In it, he acknowledged that without Turing’s work, World War II could have had quite a different outcome. PM Brown also said this:

” 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.”

That Alan Turing was a gay man is what ultimately caused his death. We should remember his contributions to the world as well. He was considered a brilliant mathematician and many consider him the father of modern computer science. In fact, in 1999, Time named him one of the 100 Most Important People of the Twentieth Century, saying, “The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine.”

Turing’s work is the basis for much of the technology we have today. Imagine what the world might have been like if he hadn’t died.