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Ask HN: Where are the gays at?
29 points by stevenp on Oct 20, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 34 comments
I posted a message on the Startup School Fridge wall looking to see if there were any other GLBT entrepreneurs going to the event, and got no reply. Working as a software engineer, I'm generally used to being the "token gay guy" at the office, but I'm curious as to whether any of you guys (or girls) are roaming HN wondering if you're also alone out there. Has Y Combinator ever funded a startup with a GLBT founder? Are there any other GLBT hackers out there? Am I missing some other awesome resource where we should all be metting? :) Thanks!


Don't personally see any reason questions such as "Has Y Combinator ever funded a startup with a GLBT founder?" matter even a tiny bit (unless there was some reason for a discussion along the lines of "Are YC people homophobic?")

Side note: I'm bi, and still don't care "where the gays are at".


I think of it as being similar to the questions about other types of minorities as startup founders. The gay community is pretty distinctive, and I'm curious to see if there's any overlap between that and the tech community. Didn't mean to offend you.


No offense at all, perfectly happy for you to be interested - just expressing my view that it doesn't matter, to me at least.


Joel Spolsky and Peter Thiel. I didn't find out they were gay for a long time, though I guess it just shows that it's not/shouldn't be anything remarkable.


I find the first one really surprising for some reason.


Joel was a real, honest-to-goodness role model for me when I was 18 and still wondering whether tech was a place where you could comfortably work as an out gay person.

He doesn't seem to do much in the way of gay activism -- his blog bio used to mention his partner by name, but it's been dropped. I sort of wish he'd do more, but on the other hand, his quiet, unassuming but unabashed acknowledgement of his sexuality is really the ideal I feel we should be aiming for.

Me, I overcompensate, but that's because I'm still angry about high school :-) It gets better, kids!


Hi! Gay co-founder of awe.sm here. I've considered posting exactly this Ask HN a few times, pleased to see somebody else did.

My side project http://gaygeeks.org is also probably pretty relevant here, if you'll excuse the (second) shameless plug :-) It's not specifically for hackers, but there are a lot of tech people in there, unsurprisingly.


Hey Laurie! I didn't count you out, of course -- I'm surprised you didn't recognize me by name. :)


"Has Y Combinator ever funded a startup with a GLBT founder?"

Yes, definitely. Considering YC has funded hundreds of companies, I expect there are quite a lot of them, but one of the characteristics of hackers is that we tend to talk about ideas instead of personal lives, even at social gatherings, so it's not something that comes up often. The ones I know of were friends of mine before they did YC.


While I empathize with the purpose of this posting, I don't personally see why it matters. I want to surround myself with smart people, be they gay, straight, or somewhere in between.

Someone posted that Joel Spolsky is gay. I remember hearing something about that a while back, but had honestly forgotten about it. What matters isn't that he's gay, but that he's smart and gets things done. Same goes for everyone else!


Why should it even matter? What unites all of us is a love for entrepreneurship or hacking or both. What difference does being gay make in this field? No one really cares about your sexual orientation in tech. Don't get me wrong I have nothing against gay people, but I find it patronizing that you need to find a "Gay Entrepreneurs" group, because I don't see people looking for the "Womanizing Entrepreneurs" or "Alcoholic Entrepreneurs"... Hell if I go about asking HN where the "Insomniac Entrepreneurs" (that would be me) are I'll get massive down voting, which won't haven to the same question but on the gay angle for political correctness.


They're out there. Does it really make a difference?


Yes, it does make a difference.

Finding a community of "People Like You" can make or break someone's journey into a new field. That means the hacker community at large needs to be equally supportive of queer hackers, or a queer hacker sub-community must form.

I'm all for the former, but let's face it: historically, us straight white males (who make up the vast majority of contemporary hackerdom) are pretty awful at making people who "Aren't Like Us" feel comfortable & welcome. (Hell--we have a hard enough time staying comfortable with eachother.)


Actually I think gays are well represented in tech because geeks tend to be more inclusive than other subgroups. I'm gay, have been very successful in tech, and have never felt unwelcome in the industry.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the Bay Area is a mecca for both geeks and gays. Something about the culture here accepts people of all varieties.

However, this is not true for old-school business types. Golfing to network, sports talk, trophy wives, talking about Entourage... all that is very foreign to me and yes I feel out of place around it.


I disagree with that stance on "equality".

I want to be outraged when someone isn't treated equally because they're gay, I don't want to celebrate when someone who's gay isn't treated negatively.


Why not both?


Because it's not equality to be happier about something good happening to someone who's gay/black/female/etc than to someone who's white/male/etc.

Does a gay man deserve anything more than a straight man?


You are correct; it does not reflect equality. But, unfortunately, it does reflect reality. In addition to being outraged at our distance from equality, I believe it is constructive to celebrate each step we take towards that goal.


To an extent, sure. To use Obama as an example (black instead of gay, but close enough), the fact that he proved a black man can get elected is fantastic, I have to admit that (I'm English) my views of America are very strongly tainted by the large amounts of racism there, both historically and today, and it's great to know that it's not quite as bad as I feared. But that's just a footnote in my mind, the fact that he's black didn't make me want him to become president - though as it happens, I did/do support him, but for his politics rather than his being a minority.


The way we become equally supportive of each other is by not forming little "sub-communities" based on race, religion, gender, orientation, eye color, hair color, car color or anything else. I don't care if the person helping me with some code is black or gay or from an alternate universe where ducks invented the transistor, but if Mr. Quackers only feels comfortable in his interdimensional hyperduck clique, he won't be able to share his knowledge with me and vice versa.

Basically, why would we want to section ourselves off? We have reddit for that. (http://www.reddit.com/r/interdimensionalhyperducks is still available!)


Forming isolated cliques is definitely a risk. However, not all sub-communities are isolated. When you're "Doing It Right," sub-communities exist to support their members in joining the parent community. If you're a Ruby programmer, you're much more likely to go to a conference if there's a Ruby panel!

In that example, the Ruby "sub-community" (panel) serves 3 functions: It gives skeptical Rubyists a "safe place" to base their experience; it gives curious non-Rubyists an entry point to start learning; and it creates an organizational "bucket" for Ruby-related discussion, so it doesn't clog other panels (as much, maybe).

Of course, "Ruby" is a separation by technical necessity, whereas "Queer" is a cultural one. I'd be remiss in claiming that the exact same forces were at work. My main point is simply:

In a perfect world, sub-communities would not be necessary. In the real world, sub-communities--when managed properly--can be a huge asset to prospective novices who don't belong to the majority.


Finding a community of "People Like You" can make or break someone's journey into a new field.

I can trace my current job situation back to a boyfriend I had in college. Job prospects were low in 2002, but he knew someone who could use a CS intern. The acquaintance created a job for me and I've been in similar fields ever since.


Somebody is going through this thread systematically down-voting every single comment. So, yeah, gays in tech could still use a little extra support.


Maybe it's that. Or maybe they feel that clique-tracking in this environment is noise and doesn't belong here. Or they had a bad day and are taking it out on HN. Don't assume you know some anonymous person's motivations.


When's the last time you downvoted every single comment in a thread because you thought the conversation didn't belong on HN? Never, because there's a flag button that actually might accomplish your goal of getting the discussion off of HN, takes way less time, and doesn't harm people that choose to take part in off-topic conversation.

If there really is someone downvoting every comment here, they're homophobic. I promise.


You're quite right. But after a lifetime of minor slights, forgive me a little paranoia :-) (I note said unknown has already downvoted your comment, too)


Wow, that's terrible. I've offset one bigot :)


As for resources, have heard about this organization dedicated to helping lgbt entrepreneurs: http://startout.org.


Lorenzo Thione, the technical co-founder of Powerset (-> Bing), helps run StartOut.

I've been to a few of their SF events, but they are usually sparse on hacker attendees.


Chris Hughes, founder of Jumo and former Facebook co-founder/spokesman, is gay. Not a technical hacker, but a hacker nonetheless.


There are gay people everywhere and they are welcome here. But does it really matter if there are some here or not?


I just disliked The Fridge the second I saw it.


I'm not gay but the father of computer science, Alan Turing, was.


Don't know any resources for queer hackers, but both of our founders are queer.




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