Alan Turing’s gay short story reveals ‘fun, cheeky’ man who loved sex and literature
A startling new study of a little-known, unpublished short story by Alan Turing challenges our understanding of the man who played a key role in cracking the Nazis' Enigma code, developed the theoretical ...
A startling new study of a little-known, unpublished short story by Alan Turing challenges our understanding of the man who played a key role in cracking the Nazis' Enigma code, developed the theoretical underpinnings of the first computers and laid the groundwork for the development of artificial intelligence.
'Pryce's Buoy,' a six-page, scruffily handwritten fragment of a short story cared for by archivists at King's College, Cambridge, has been transcribed and fully studied for the first time. Professor Sarah Dillon's findings, published in The Review of English Studies, will surprise anyone 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—centers on Ron Miller, a working-class rent boy, and Alec Pryce, a homosexual scientist famed for an invention in his 20s known as 'Pryce's buoy,' hence the title sometimes given to the story. Alec's character is clearly autofictional—he represents Turing himself—and Dillon has no doubt that 'Pryce's Buoy' is a direct fictionalization of the late 1951 sexual encounter that led to Turing's arrest.
Tired after a period of intense work and Christmas shopping, Alec feels he's 'earned' some fun and goes looking for a young man. The narrator then switches from Alec's mind to Ron's. He's broke, unemployed and looking to make some money from sex.
Ron thinks to himself: 'If he let someone take him under the arches for 10 minutes he might get five bob.'
He spots a 'chap' giving him a look as he walks past. Turing writes: 'Ron caught Alec's eye and gave him a half-hearted smile. It was enough though.'
Sitting on a park bench, the men assess the situation and each other. Ron thinks Alec is shabbily dressed but 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 walk to a restaurant. Turing writes that Ron: 'didn't go in for lah-di-dah ways of talking. It'd come to the same anyway. Bed's bed whatever way you get into it. Alec thought otherwise.'
Dillon says, "I love the hesitancy, the way it evokes the uncertainty of a 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 in the restaurant, mid-sentence at the bottom right of a page, with the words '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 mom 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 leading 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
Dillon's most exciting discovery identifies a fellow Bletchley Park veteran as the inspiration behind Turing's short story. At the end of 1942, Turing was at Bletchley at the same time as Angus Wilson (1913–1991), who was translating Italian naval codes. They didn't meet but became acquainted after the war through King's College, Cambridge, social circles.
In late 1951, Turing had a sexual encounter with Arnold Murray in Manchester. Both men were arrested for gross indecency and convicted in March 1952. It was already known that Turing read homosexual fiction, including the work of Angus Wilson, but Dillon reveals a very specific literary debt. In July 1952, Wilson published Hemlock and After, a pioneering gay novel—almost banned from libraries—that had a profound impact on Turing.
In fact, on close reading of Turing's story and Wilson's novel, Dillon discovered that Turing "copied" one section of Wilson's 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 focalization which Wilson deploys throughout Hemlock and After."
"We shouldn't be surprised or critical about this," Dillon emphasizes. "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 precisely the novel Turing needed to read at a pivotal moment 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 well as calling for a reassessment of Turing's character, Dillon argues that Wilson deserves far more appreciation. Wilson's postwar novels about English life almost always include gay characters, not as exceptions, but as a normal 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 points out that the most celebrated gay novel of the 20th century, E.M. Forster's Maurice, wasn't published until 1971, after Forster's death. "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 favor in academic literary studies in the 1970s, as they became increasingly interested in more radical and subversive gay literature.
Is Turing's story any good?
Like Wilson, Turing tries to weave the inner thoughts of his characters into a wider social scape. "That's hard, and Turing has a good stab at it," Dillon says.
She is also keen to point out that Turing did more than just copy Wilson. In particular, Turing added a layer to the story in which Ron thinks about how well his more effeminate-looking acquaintance Eric does with 'toffs.'
"I love Turing's shifting focalization," 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 adds that Turing's story "combines psychological insight—which modernists like Virginia Woolf were really good at—with social realism, which is what the 19th-century greats Turing admired were good at."
Dillon suggests that Turing might have overused the word 'rather' but reminds readers that this was not a final draft and certainly hadn't been through an editor.
STEM and the humanities
Dillon hopes that Turing's love of literature will help challenge the polarization and prioritization of STEM subjects 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 polarize or aggrandize one over the other, you lose the mix we need to function as individuals and communities."
Dillon is currently writing two books about Alan Turing: Turing and Me and Turing's Literature: An Alternative History of Influence.
More information
'Pryce's Buoy': Alan Turing's Autofictional Short Story, The Review of English Studies (2026). DOI: 10.1093/res/hgag047
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