Just about everyone else involved with The Imitation Game has stepped up defend the fact it’s about a gay person but doesn’t portray its main subject as being particularly gay. While it doesn’t pretend Alan Turing was straight, in the movie he doesn’t have any sex and the only relationship we’re shown is a schoolboy infatuation.

Now it’s the turn of director Morten Tyldum to defends the lack of a gay relationship to Variety saying, “First of all, the time period we’re all focusing on, he didn’t have one. He described it in his own words as a ‘sexual desert’ in a letter. The whole thing is his relationship with Christopher [Turing’s male crush seen in flashbacks in grade school], about unfulfilled love.”

When pressed about the fact Turing did have relationships with men in real life, Morten says says, “He had people he had sex with, yes — especially in the time after the war, when he’s living in Manchester. The break-in that happens in the film is a male lover, which is discussed. It was actually someone he paid to have sex with. It was more of a hustler.”

Tyldum also says he doesn’t gay relationship and sex it would have enriched the film, adding, “The whole movie, the way it’s structured, we don’t know anything about this man. The whole investigation starts because he’s hiding something, but he’s not hiding what we think. It can’t start off with him having sex. It was not because we were afraid it would offend anybody. If I did the structure and had this thing about a straight character, I would never have a sex scene to prove that he’s heterosexual. If I have a gay character in a movie, I need to have a sex scene in it — just to prove that he’s gay? I’m not shying away from it. His whole relationship, how he falls in love and the importance of him being a gay man, was all about secrecy.”

However, rather like previous defenders such as Benedict Cumberbatch and Matthew Goode, Tyldum seems to acquaint showing someone being a fully gay person with filming them in bed with another man. What none on the defences have addressed is that most of the criticism is that some believe the movie presents Turing’s sexuality in a perfunctory way as a small adjunct to his personality, rather than as a key part of who he is. And seeing as he has increasingly become iconic for many LGBT people, they view this as a major problem with the film.

That said, it’s not like the movie pretends that he’s straight, so perhaps Tyldum has a clumsy point.