From: hal@finney.org <hal@finney.org>
>It would be interesting to know whether any of the various writers
>who have influenced our beliefs are thought to have been homosexual.
>Homosexuals have played a disproportionate part in creating modern
>culture, both popular and "serious", over the course of this century.
>I wonder whether they have also influenced extropian ideas, or whether
>on the other hand there is something about the particular flavor of our
>beliefs which makes them less attractive to homosexuals?
"Alan Turing, a British mathematician who committed suicide by biting a poisoned apple. As a discovered homosexual, he had been given a forced choice by the British courts either to go to jail or to take the feminizing hormone estrogen. he chose the latter, with feminizing effects on his body, and who knows what effect on his brain. That brain gave rise to a powerful set of mathematical ideas, one of which is known as a Turning machine." ----Gerald m. Edelman, _Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, On the Matter of the Mind_, p. 218.