Jon “Maddog” Hall has announced he
is gay, saying he wanted to the 100th anniversary of Alan
Turing's birthday.
Turing is the British mathematician who
helped crack the German Enigma machine code – a triumph of computer
science and a turning point for the Allies in World War II.
He died an early death for
acknowledging that he was gay. In 1952, Turing and Arnold Murray
were charged with gross indecency after Turing disclosed their
relationship to detectives investigating a break in at Turing's
Manchester home. Turing was
convicted and given the choice of going to prison or submitting to a
form of chemical castration via estrogen hormone injections. He
chose the latter. The therapy left him impotent and he developed
breasts.
It is widely
believed that he committed suicide two years after his arrest by
eating a cyanide-laced apple.
Hall, the executive director of Linux
International, a non-profit organization which supports and promotes
Linux-based operating systems, wrote in an op-ed titled In Honor
of Alan Turing: A message from the sponsor published in Linux
Magazine that Turing was one of his personal heroes.
He said he decided to publicly come out
after he started campaigning for gay marriage.
“My sexuality was not a big part of
my life,” he wrote. “But earlier this year I began donating to
the marriage equality campaign in New Hampshire. I began staffing
the phones in call centers when the New Hampshire
Republican-controlled House looked as if they would repeal marriage
equality (they have not … yet), and I patiently explained to my
next-door neighbor of twenty years (also my representative to the New
Hampshire legislature) that I was a homosexual and that marriage
equality would not bring the destruction of New Hampshire.”
“It has been in the push for this one
issue that I have seen really horrible statements put forth about
homosexuals which told me that I just could not keep silent any
more.”
Hall, 61, added that he would
understand if people un-friended or un-followed him on social
networks. However, the overwhelming majority of comments on his post
were supportive.