Still checking out the newly redesigned New York Times Magazine – so far, so good. But I was excited to see a page on “shipping” in the column Search Results by Jenna Wortham. And no, it wasn’t a column about Fed Ex.

Shipping is about relationshipping, or a romance between characters who are not otherwise romantically linked, such as Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman’s Dr. John Watson on PBS’ “Sherlock.” (Drawings of them from the Tumblr website are featured on the Search Results page.)

Shipping, then, is the umbrella term for things like slash – gay pairings of characters who were not originally gay – and slash in turn includes male/male romance, which is where I come in. Though the characters in my series “The Games Men Play” – the swimmers and tennis players in “Water Music” and the football players in the forthcoming “The Penalty for Holding” – are entirely fictional, I won’t pretend that I wasn’t influenced by male/male romances I read on the Internet that either used real people (called RPF or real person fiction) or well-known fictional characters. ...

Thanks to Marshall Fine, critic-in-residence at The Picture House in Pelham, I had the opportunity recently to preview “The Imitation Game,” which has “Oscar nods” written all over it, deservedly so. It’s a superbly crafted film about a story that resonates in our own time, acted with the kind of understated emotion that is the hallmark of British performance by a cast that includes Benedict Cumberbatch (“Sherlock”) and Keira Knightley.

The film, which opens Nov. 28, tells the story of Alan Turing, the mathematician who cracked Germany’s Enigma Code during World War II by creating a machine that was the forerunner of the computer, saving millions of lives in the process (although that, we shall see, was complicated).

Turing was a man ahead of his time in many ways. Today he’d be a gay Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Instead he was a closeted social misfit – taunted mercilessly at prep school in the savage way that belongs exclusively to children and later prosecuted when his homosexuality was uncovered after the war. Forced to choose chemical castration in lieu of a prison sentence, he committed suicide in 1954 at age 41 – one of 49,000 men prosecuted for homosexual acts in England between 1885 and 1967. In 2013, Turing was pardoned by Queen Elizabeth II – which still implies he did something wrong to begin with. ...

‘Shipping’ news

Alan Turing, gay sex and the real ‘Imitation Game’