Alan Turing’s Gay Short Story Portrays Playful Man Obsessed with Sex, Literature

A new study based on an unpublished fragment suggests that Alan Turing—often framed as emotionally distant and solely logic-driven—wrote a surprisingly playful, sexually confident short story. The six-page manuscript, held at King’s College Cambridge and nicknamed “Pryce’s Buoy,” has been transcribed and analyzed for the first time by Professor Sarah Dillon. Her findings, published in The Review of English Studies, challenge the popular “isolated mathematician” narrative reinforced by portrayals such as The Imitation Game.

The story centers on Ron Miller, a working-class rent boy, and Alec Pryce, a homosexual scientist. Dillon argues that Pryce is effectively Turing in fiction: the character’s experiences are consistent with a real-life sexual encounter in late 1951 that preceded Turing’s arrest. What emerges from Dillon’s close reading is not only a depiction of desire, but also the internal hesitations of two people navigating uncertainty—whether they’re misreading signals, going too far, or backing out.

Technically, Dillon highlights how Turing uses rapid shifts in “focalisation,” alternating access to different characters’ thoughts while maintaining a unified narrative momentum. This technique, she says, allows the prose to track micro-decisions in real time—how a half-hearted smile becomes “enough,” or how a conversation about “talking ways” collapses into the pragmatic reality that “bed’s bed.” The fragment, however, abruptly breaks off mid-sentence, leaving readers with a tantalizing, unresolved plot.

Even more striking is Dillon’s claim about influence. She identifies a specific literary source: Hemlock and After, a pioneering gay novel by fellow Bletchley Park veteran Angus Wilson. Using close comparative reading, Dillon reports that Turing “copied” not in a vague sense, but through recognizable parallels—matching sequences of events, echoing phrases and diction, and adopting Wilson’s narrative method for switching viewpoints.

Importantly for viral-science audiences, this is where the “why it matters” becomes broader than literature: the study reframes Turing’s creativity as part of a technical mind. Dillon argues that writing served as a form of psychological release for Turing, especially after trauma, and that the story’s realism blends modernist interiority with social observation.

Dillon also points to Turing’s class-aware complexity. In the fragment, Ron’s thoughts about more effeminate-looking Eric’s success with “toffs” complicate a simplistic account of interclass encounters. The result is a narrative that combines psychological insight with social realism—an approach that mirrors how rigorous reasoning can coexist with experimental perspective-taking.

Finally, Dillon uses the discovery to press a cultural argument: STEM and the humanities shouldn’t be treated as separate worlds. If scientists read and write—and if literary craft can involve sophisticated thinking—then Turing becomes a case study in intellectual hybridity rather than a stereotype of isolation.

The study is funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, and the underlying manuscript is viewable via the Turing Digital Archive at King’s College Cambridge.