Alan Turing’s homosexual quick story reveals ‘fun, cheeky’ man

‘This chap would do well enough. Not a real beauty, but had a certain appeal. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.’

‘Eric with his pansying and his pretty-pretty dolls face could get them as easy as looking’

_{Quotations from Alan Turing’s quick story often known as ‘Pryce’s Buoy’}

A startling new examine of a little-known, unpublished quick story by Alan Turing challenges our understanding of the person who performed a key position in cracking the Nazi’s Enigma code, developed the theoretical underpinning of the primary computer systems, and laid the groundwork for the event of synthetic intelligence.

‘Pryce’s Buoy’, a six-page, scruffily hand-written fragment of a short story cared for by archivists at King’s College Cambridge has been transcribed and absolutely studied for the primary time.

Professor Sarah Dillon’s findings, printed in the present day in The Review of English Studies, will shock anybody who accepts The Imitation Game’s portrayal of Turing.

“We’ve distilled a version of Turing that is a two-dimensional stereotype,” says Dillon, a Professor at Cambridge’s Faculty of English.

“He’s come to be seen as socially unaware, entirely concerned with logic and numbers, and pretty isolated. His short story reveals a very different man: playful, funny, cheeky, literary, and someone who really liked sex.”

Turing’s story – which Dillon believes he wrote in late 1952 or early 1953 – centres on Ron Miller, a working-class lease boy; and Alec Pryce, a gay scientist famed for an invention in his twenties often known as ‘Pryce’s buoy’, therefore the title typically given to the story.

Alec’s character is clearly autofictional – he represents Turing himself – and Dillon has little question that ‘Pryce’s Buoy’ is a direct fictionalisation of the late 1951 sexual encounter which led to Turing’s arrest.

Tired after a interval of intense work and Christmas buying, Alec feels he’s ‘earned’ some enjoyable and goes on the lookout for a younger man. The narrator then switches from Alec’s thoughts to Ron’s. He’s broke, unemployed and trying to make some cash from intercourse.

Ron thinks to himself: ‘If he let someone take him under the arches for ten minutes he might get five bob.’

He spots a ‘chap’ giving him a glance as he walks previous. Turing writes: ‘Ron caught Alec’s eye and gave him a half-hearted smile. It was sufficient although.’

Sat on a park bench, the lads assess the scenario and one another. Ron thinks Alec is shabbily dressed however wealthy-ish. Ron wonders: ‘Could he be mistaken? No, he was having a furtive look. Just a bit shy;’

Alec’s impression of Ron is: ‘Not a real beauty, but had a certain appeal. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.’

The pair then stroll to a restaurant. Turing writes that Ron: ‘didn’t go in for lah-di-dah methods of speaking. It’d come to the identical anyway. Bed’s mattress no matter manner you get into it. Alec thought in any other case’.

Professor Dillon says: “I love the hesitancy, the way it evokes the uncertainty of potential sexual encounter, the ‘am I reading this situation wrong?’ worry. ‘Am I going to put my foot in it?’ ‘Am I going to go too far?’ ‘What did they want?’ ‘What do I want?’ ‘Can I back out?’ Turing gets those tensions, the leaning in and backing out. He does it really well.”

The story abruptly cuts off within the restaurant, mid-sentence on the bottom-right of a web page, with the phrases ‘Ron wouldn’t’.

“There was clearly more and that’s so frustrating,” says Dillon. “We don’t know where the rest of it went. We don’t know if Turing’s mum censored it. Did it get more sexually explicit? How did it end? That’s frustrating but everything else is so exciting.”

“Turing died when he was only 41, and in those years running up to his death, he was trying to understand himself and his world. Literature offered him a really powerful way of doing that. This was the moment when he really felt a release, a chance to be more creative and playful.” 

Turing’s inspiration revealed

Professor Dillon’s most enjoyable discovery identifies a fellow Bletchley Park veteran because the inspiration behind Turing’s quick story. At the tip of 1942, Turing was at Bletchley similtaneously Angus Wilson (1913–1991), who was translating Italian naval codes. They didn’t meet however grew to become acquainted after the warfare via King’s College Cambridge social circles. 

In late 1951, Turing had a sexual encounter with Arnold Murray in Manchester. Both males had been arrested for gross indecency and convicted in March 1952. It was already identified that Turing learn gay fiction, together with the work of Angus Wilson, however Dillon reveals a really particular literary debt.

In July 1952, Wilson printed Hemlock and After, a pioneering homosexual novel – virtually banned from libraries – which had a profound impression on Turing.

In reality, on shut studying Turing’s story and Wilson’s novel, Dillon found that Turing “copied” one part of Wilson’s e book “in many explicit ways, including replicating the order of events in the plot, reproducing the same (or very similar) phrases and diction, and adopting the narrative technique of shifting focalisation which Wilson deploys throughout Hemlock and After.”

We shouldn’t be shocked or vital about this, Dillon emphasises: “When you start trying your hand as a creative writer, you copy what inspires you. It’s a kind of scaffolding because writing creatively is scary. It’s completely normal that Turing copied Wilson.”

Dillon argues that Hemlock and After was exactly the novel Turing wanted to learn at a pivotal second in his life. “Wilson showed that homosexuality was normal and an integrated part of many people’s psychological and social lives,” Dillon says. “He also made the law against it look increasingly outlandish.”

“Imagine being Turing. You’re a homosexual man, you’ve been prosecuted, you’ve been forced to take hormone treatment. And then just months later, you read this novel. It must have been such a powerful moment for Turing amid so much trauma.”

As effectively as calling for a reassessment of Turing’s character, Professor Dillon argues that Angus Wilson deserves much more appreciation. Wilson’s post-war novels about English life virtually at all times embody homosexual characters, not as exceptions, simply as a traditional a part of that social world.

“They are all detailed and sensitive, honest and funny,” Dillon says. “Wilson was very active politically and taught some of the great authors of the late 20th century how to write. He should be much better known.”

Dillon factors out that probably the most celebrated homosexual novel of the twentieth century, E.M. Forster’s Maurice, wasn’t printed till 1971, after Forster’s dying. “Wilson was bolder,” Dillon says. “He thought Forster hid and failed to use his powerful reputation.”

Wilson died in poverty and ignominy in 1991, having fallen out of favour in educational literary research within the Seventies, because it grew to become more and more involved in extra radical and subversive homosexual literature. 

Is Turing’s story any good?

Like Wilson, Turing tries to weave the interior ideas of his characters right into a wider social scape. “That’s hard and Turing has a good stab at it,” Dillon says.

She can also be eager to level out that Turing did extra than simply copy Wilson. In explicit, Turing added a layer to the story during which Ron thinks about how effectively his extra effeminate-looking acquaintance Eric does with ‘toffs’.

“I love Turing’s shifting focalisation,” Dillon says. “He gets this from Wilson, of course, who gives us access to both his characters’ minds too. But in the Turing story that access goes a step further, taking us out into their thoughts about their wider professional lives and social networks. When Turing does this with Ron, he starts to challenge some dominant narratives around interclass pickups at that time.”

She provides that Turing’s story “combines psychological insight – which modernists like Virginia Woolf were really good at – with social realism, which is what the 19^th-century greats Turing admired were good at.”

Dillon means that Turing may need overused the phrase ‘rather’ however reminds readers that this was not a ultimate draft and positively hadn’t been via an editor. 

STEM and the Humanities

Dillon hopes that Turing’s love of literature will assist problem the polarisation and prioritisation of STEM topics over the humanities.  

“We need to stop thinking that the literary and the scientific are binary opposites. They’re not,” she says. “Lots of scientists read and write literature, and lots of literary people are very skilled at science. If you polarise or aggrandise one over the other, you lose the mix we need to function as individuals and communities.”

Sarah Dillon is at present writing two books about Alan Turing: Turing and Me; and Turing’s Literature: An Alternative History of Influence. 

Reference

S. Dillon, ‘Pryce’s Buoy’: Alan Turing’s Autofictional Short Story’, The Review of English Studies (2026). DOI: 10.1093/res/hgag047

The Turing Digital Archive, King’s College Cambridge: AMT/A/13 Undated short story by Alan Turing sometimes referred to as ‘Pryce’s Buoy’.

Funding

This work was funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.

Alan Turing and King’s College

Alan Turing (1912–1954) grew to become an undergraduate at King’s College Cambridge in October 1931. He obtained a First in Part II of the Mathematical Tripos in 1934 and was made a Fellow in 1935 for his work ‘On the Gaussian Error Function’. He remained a non-resident Fellow of the College till 1952.

The Turing Collection consists of Turing’s letters, in addition to transcriptions of talks, images and unpublished papers, in addition to memoirs and obituaries written about him. Many of those paperwork, together with ‘Pryce’s Buoy’ have been digitised and might be seen by way of The Turing Digital Archive.