Putting Alan Turing on the £50 note doesn’t mean that the government cares about LGBT+ youth

For the government, it’s much cheaper to elevate a gay man who is famous and dead, than to support LGBTQIA+ people who are unknown but alive, writes Nathan Kiley

A £50 banknote featuring Alan Turing is set for release on Wednesday (PA Wire)

Today – 23 June – on what would be his 108^th birthday, Alan Turing appears on the new £50 note. This is an extraordinary act of public reclamation for a scientific genius and war hero who was criminalised for his homosexuality, and who consequently ended his own life aged 41. The government also recently announced that the replacement for the Erasmus Scheme for international student exchanges will be named the Turing Scheme, in his honour.

It is wonderful news that the Enigma code breaker and inventor of machine learning is finally being honoured for his achievements. But it remains a tragedy that such a brilliant man was driven to suicide, with his career and reputation in ruins, when he still had so much to contribute to the world.

Turing’s sentence, in 1952, at the age of 39 for the crime of sexual intercourse with another man, included being forced to undergo what would now be described as gay conversion therapy: he was required to attend sessions with a psychotherapist who was authorised to use verbal and physical abuse to “dissuade” patients of their homosexuality.