Alfred Kinsey

June 23 is a pretty big day for LGBT+ people, apparently. Not only is it my birthday (and isn’t that enough?) and the birthday of Alan Turing, it is also the birthday of Alfred Kinsey. You might be thinking “gosh, that last name sounds super familiar” but more likely you immediately associated the name with the Kinsey Scale. But Kinsey’s contributions to society and to LGBT culture went far beyond a simplified way of explaining fluid sexuality.

Alfred Kinsey was born in 1894 in Hoboken, New Jersey (his first mistake). Kinsey’s family was poor for the majority of his childhood, which meant they could not provide proper medical care for a number of illnesses that Kinsey contracted — including Rickets, which left him with a slight stoop. This would later prevent Kinsey from being drafted into World War I.

Kinsey also had a love of nature and enjoyed camping — he became one of the first Eagle Scouts in the Boy Scouts of America in 1913. In high school, Kinsey showed a keen aptitude for science — particularly biology, botany, and zoology. He cited his high school biology teacher Natalie Roeth as the most important influence on his decision to become a biologist. (A decision which seemed to cause a rift between Kinsey and his seriously overbearing father.)

Kinsey got his doctorate and traveled widely, studying gall wasps and other insects. Of the 18 million insect samples at the American Museum of Natural History, an estimated 5 million are gall wasps collected by Kinsey. He also published “An Introduction to Biology” in 1926, which was widely used in high schools (and I swear was the textbook we used at my high school. I’m kidding. I think.)

Kinsey is most known for his work as a sexologist. He became interested in the topic while discussing the mating habits of gall wasps with a colleague. Early on in his studies, he developed the Kinsey Scale — where a person’s sexual orientation could be rated from 0 (for exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (for exclusively homosexual). Kinsey believed everyone was bisexual ot varying degrees, probably because of his own bisexuality. He did later add a rating of “X” for “no socio-sexual contacts or reactions”. In his youth, Kinsey had routinely physically punished himself for his homoerotic feelings — so this scale was likely not just an effort to normalize for society, but to normalize them for himself.

Kinsey, through his two books (“Sexual Behavior in the Human Male”, 1948 & “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female”, 1953) that are collectively called “The Kinsey Reports” also laid the groundwork for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. He argued against the commonly accepted (by men) belief that women were not sexual beings. He insisted that clitoral orgasms were superior to vaginal orgasms. Both books became bestsellers, and Kinsey attained celebrity status.

Unfortunately, that celebrity status came with a lot of controversy. Kinsey was criticized for his research methods, for his own participation in sexual experiments, and for filming some of these experiments in his attic. Others criticized his survey samples, which were heavily homosexual and even more heavily white. He also caught the attention of U.S. Customs because he traveled around the world and brought back his research material, and Customs confiscated a lot of said material.

Kinsey died on August 26, 1956. He was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor museum honoring LGBT history, in 2012. (He is the third person I’ve covered so far who is honored there, the others being Alan Turing and Christine Jorgensen.)

(Adapted from this Facebook post.)

Christine Jorgensen

Christine Jorgensen was the first US citizen to receive gender reassignment surgery (or, gender confirmation surgery, as we call it now). She was born May 30, 1936 in the Bronx, New York and given the name George William Jorgensen Jr.

In 1945 she graduated high school and was drafted into the army. She served in World War II. After the war she attended Mohawk Valley Community College, the Progressive School of Photography in New Haven, and the Manhattan Medical and Dental Assistant School.

At some point after returning home from the war, she learned about gender reassignment surgery and decided that was something she wanted to pursue. Guided by Dr. Joseph Angelo, the husband of a classmate at the Manhattan Mental and Dental Assistant School, she learned everything she could about the surgery. At the time, the only doctors who would perform the surgery were in Sweden. While traveling there, she met a Dr. Christian Hamburger who specialized in rehabilitative hormone therapy. Christine opted to stay in Denmark a have hormone replacement therapy with Dr. Hamburger. She ultimately chose the name Christine for herself in Dr. Hamburger’s honor.

Christine managed to get special permission from the Danish government to undergo the surgeries she was seeking at a hospital in Copenhagen. On October 8, 1951 — only partially through the series of surgeries — she wrote a letter to friends in the United States where she stated:

“As you can see by the enclosed photos, taken just before the operation, I have changed a great deal. But it is the other changes that are so much more important. Remember the shy, miserable person who left America? Well, that person is no more and, as you can see, I’m in marvelous spirits.”

After her second surgery (a penectomy), she returned to the United States where she would eventually get vaginoplasty, with the help of Dr. Angelo, once it was permitted in the country.

On December 1, 1952, the New York Daily News put Christine on their front page with the headline “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Bombshell: Operations Transform Bronx Youth”. The article claimed that Christine was the first person to receive a “sex change”. Because of this article, Christine became an instant celebrity — and Christine used this platform to speak up on behalf of transgender people everywhere.

After her vaginoplasty, Christine tried to marry twice. First, she became engaged to a labor union statistician named John Traub, but the engagement was called off. In 1959 she got engaged to a typist named Howard J. Knox. Knox lost his job when news of the engagement became public — and their request for a marriage license was denied because Christine was still legally considered a man.

Christine began working as an actress and a nightclub performer — noted for singing songs like “I Enjoy Being a Girl”. One of her performances was recorded and is available on iTunes — or so I’m told by Wikipedia; I haven’t checked yet but I did check Spotify and it definitely is not there. (Though I did find a song called “Christine” by a Jimmy Jorgensen but I’m really sure there’s no connection.) She toured and spoke at college campuses throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, giving transgender people even greater visibility.

In 1989, Christine stated that she had given the sexual revolution a “good swift kick in the pants”. She passed away on May 3 of that year due to bladder and lung cancer. In 2012, she was inducted into the Legacy Walk.

(Adapted from this Facebook post.)

Alan Turing

This post is like SUPER long, but this man did a LOT of stuff that is really important even to this day and he deserves to have it all celebrated. Let’s get into it:

Alan Turing was born on June 23, 1912 in London. (He was one of a handful LGBT+ figures who were born on this day — the birthday is shared by Alfred Kinsey, and myself. 😛) Turing is often known as the father of theoretical computer science as well as artificial intelligence, and is known for his work in code-breaking. In truth, he accomplished a great deal more than that before his death on June 7, 1954. (And that’s why we’re doing his post today!)

Alan Turing displayed signs of genius early on in life, showing incredible gifts at science and math, which were recognized by his teachers. At the age of 13, he was sent to Sherborne boarding school — however, his aptitude for math and science was not appreciated by many of the staff there, who sought to create more well-rounded students. Nevertheless, Turing would find inspiration for much of his later work at the school — by working on advancing his own education alongside his “first love” (albeit unrequited) Christopher Morcom. On February 13 of 1930, Morcom died from complications related to bovine tuberculosis, which he had contracted several years earlier. To work through his grief, Alan dedicated himself even more fully to his studies of math.

Turing attended university at King’s College in Cambridge. (That’s Cambridge in England, not in Massachusetts, for the Bostonians reading this.) At this point, Turing began writing and publishing dissertations on things that I am truly not smart enough to explain, so I’m just going to tell you what they were and let you Google them. In 1935, Turing wrote a dissertation that proved the central limit theorem. He was elected a fellow of King’s College as a result, because neither Turing nor the committee realized that the theorem had already been proven in 1922. I guess that’s what happens when you go to university before the invention of the Internet. In 1936, Turing published a paper called “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” (I’ll admit to copying and pasting that last word there because wtf Germany, is that word for real?) In this paper, Turing essentially planned out the devices that would be called Turing machines, and proved that the-then hypothetical machine would be able to solve any computation that could be solved by an algorithm — and also apparently proved that you couldn’t mathematically prove whether or not his hypothetical machine would ever stop, or something. I mentioned that this is way over my head, right?

Apparently, someone else also beat Turing to the punch with the things he was proving about the Entscheidungsproblem (seriously, Germany, wtf?) — but Turing’s answers were considered far more accessible than those provided by Alonzo Church. As a result, Turing machines became central to the science of computers and are apparently still studied as part of the theory of computation. Likely because of their common interest in developing machines that could compute literally anything, Turing began to study under Alonzo Church at Princeton University from 1936 to 1938. It was here that Turing began to study cryptology, or code breaking. After earning his PhD, Turing returned to Cambridge to give lectures, and he also joined the British code-breaking organization called the Government Code & Cipher School (GC&CS).

The day after Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Turing reported for duty at Bletchley Park — which was the wartime headquarters for the GC&CS. He is credited with essentially five different code-breaking techniques, including the bombe which was the primary automated method used by the GC&CS during World War II. For a time, he led Hut 8 — the British group in charge of breaking German naval ciphers. Never one to stop being a scholar, Turing also published two papers on mathematical approaches to codebreaking — however, these papers contained such valuable information to the British codebreaking organization that they were not actually released until 2012.

Turing’s work is estimated to have saved thousands of lives during World War II, and is said to have shorted the war by as much as two years. In 1946, King George IV awarded Turing the Order of the British Empire even though Turing’s work remained secret for years to come.

In 1945, Turing began working on an Automatic Computing Engine (ACE). He also wrote and presented a paper on a hypothetical computer that could store programming — unheard of at the time. (Once again, Turing was beaten to the punch on the *idea* but the paper that preceded him was apparently too vague to be taken seriously.) On May 10, 1950 a pilot version of the ACE enacted its first program — although Turing was at Cambridge at the time and did not witness the event. Turing’s ACE would not be truly completed until after his death.

Turing also became interested in other, more obscure forms of mathematics at about this time. He developed what is known as the Turing test — a test to determine whether or not a machine had true intelligence. This test is still used today, and in fact every one of those CAPTCHA tests that drive us all nuts is a reverse Turing test. He also worked on creating a chess program for computers — even though computers capable of running the program did not exist. The algorithm was completed in 1953, but could only be demonstrated by Turing flipping through his work to play the game of chess out on and actual chessboard. He also became keenly interested in mathematical biology (which I frankly did not even know was a thing until I started researching him) and particularly in morphogenesis (I don’t know what that is either). Despite publishing his work on morphogenesis before DNA was discovered, his paper is still considered relevant by biologists to this day.

In December of 1951, Turing began a relationship with an unemployed nineteen year old named Arnold Murray. Shortly afterwards, a burglar broke into Turing’s house — Murray said he knew the man, and Turing reported the crime to the police. However, during the course of the investigation, the sexual relationship between the two men was discovered. Homosexual acts were still illegal in the United Kingdom at the time, considered “gross indecency” under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Both men were charged with the crime.

Turing pled guilty to the crime. The case Regina v. Turing and Murray went to trial on March 31, 1952. Turing was convicted, stripped of his security clearance, barred from doing anymore cryptographic consulting, and given a choice: imprisonment, or probation with a hormonal treatment to lower his libido for one year. He opted for probation. The hormonal treatment, however, rendered him impotent and caused gynaecomastia (the growth of breast tissue in men). As a result of the conviction, Turing was also denied entry in the United States of America.

On June 7, 1954 Alan Turing died of cyanide poisoning. His body was discovered by his housekeeper the next day. Because there was a half-eaten apple by his bed, it was assumed that he committed suicide by ingesting the cyanide with the apple. There are theories, however, that his death was actually an accident as he was keeping some lab equipment in his bedroom, which used cyanide to dissolve gold. Yet others believe he intentionally put the equipment in his room to make his suicide look more like an accident. Some are still calling for a renewed investigation into his death.

In 2014, Turing was officially posthumously pardoned for the crime of gross indecency by the Queen. His was only the fourth royal pardon since the end of World War II. As of 2016, in what is informally called the “Alan Turing Law”, others convicted of historical laws that outlawed homosexual acts are being pardoned in England and Wales.

On June 5, 2019 Alan Turing received an obituary from the New York Times as part of their “Overlooked” series.

(Adapted from this Facebook post.)