It don't matter if you're gay or straight.

I'm a day late in commemorating his death, I know, but it was 60 years ago yesterday that Alan Turing died.

Does the name ring a bell?  It should: he was the great codebreaker from World War 2, a national hero.

Oh, and he was gay.

The last bit is the least important to many of us these days but it wasn't in the 1950s when Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality (I am not making this up) and later chemically castrated. And in 1954, aged 41, he killed himself.

I can only imagine what it must have been like in those days. What with all these black people arriving from the West Indies, taking jobs over here in the NHS and keeping our transport system running, you can't imagine someone like Nigel Farage looking back to a golden period in British history.

Unless you are a complete lunatic, or a member of the US Tea Party (probably the same thing), you probably know that you cannot cure homosexuality anymore than you can cure heterosexuality.

It might be that your religious superstition leads you to believe that homsexuality is somehow unnatural, but then I might say that belief in a supernatural creator on the basis of some stories written in times when almost everyone was illiterate and uneducated was even more absurd.

My mum taught me very early on what a gay person was like.

She had a hairdresser called John who called by at the house.  He had a partner who happened to be another man and it didn't even occur to me that there might be anything unusual about it.  My mum just explained it, all matter-of-factly, that people weren't all the same.

So I was lucky.  

But others weren't, and still aren't, so understanding.

Bigotry still remains in all kinds of ways.

I have little time for David Cameron or George Osborne who are obnoxious posh boys who feel they are born to rule and thanks to the half-witted Liberals they're being given a chance to, but on the issue of homosexuality they've shown unusually liberal values.

Osborne spoke out for Turing and Cameron supported equal marriage, brave moves in the Nasty (Conservative) Party in which family values usually mean straight heterosexual values within marriage.

So it's a small step forward in a world where many people fear 'coming out' as gay.

Hopefully, in 100 years no one will feel the need to come out because no one will care whether anyone is gay or straight. The question won't matter.

It matters today, in politics, in sport and in public life even though it shouldn't.

So when you celebrate the brief life of Alan Turing, just think of him as a British hero.  His sexuality was none of our business.