People have been comparing tech - the status games, power brokering, need to juggle context-dependent sets of morals, etc - to working in Hollywood for as long as I can remember.

Under that mental model, the only thing surprising about this article is that WIRED would publish.

TIL YC is just a bunch of gay dudes

Despite being gay and working in tech, I somehow didn't realize for the longest time that (e.g.) Sam Altman and Tim Cook are gay. And apparently none of this is old news. Not sure what rock I've been living under :P

Also, this pairs well with a piece I've been thinking about lately about the number of gay men working in the Trump administration. It's bittersweet (but mostly bitter) that we've reached a point where you can be openly LGB* in the upper echelons of power, but very few of them are using that power for good. Although I guess that's part of the bargain, that you're shielded from the worst harm _if_ you're willing to serve the machine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/style/gay-men-trump-admin...

* Or at least L or G. Arguably B, almost certainly not T.

I am 42. I came out when I was 19. I’ve worked in tech for 15 years, though no in the Valley.

I have a snarky response, then a real response.

Snark: Oh like a bunch of gays are capable of that level of coordination without it breaking into vicious drama and infighting. We can barely hold together a volleyball team sometimes.

Real: Well, yes, a lot of gay guys do know each other, especially in dense urban cities like SF, NYC, and Chicago, because we are all in the same sports leagues, we go to the same bars, we go to the same circuit parties, and it’s natural to give someone you know an internal referral as a leg up, because it’s a lot easier to hire someone you know versus sifting through 1600 job applications from strangers.

Peter Thiel is gay??

"...part of “an insular, hypermasculine culture” in which “women are seen as totally redundant and completely unnecessary.” (A woman who once worked for a gay Republican startup founder describes it like this: “You get about the same amount of misogyny, but not the sexual harassment. So that’s nice.”)"

Tried many times to explain this to women - cis straight men are not your blockers, especially fathers.

Men who legit see you as redundant are.

"Allies" has been such an DEI Orwellian term.

Same with "racism" - up is down, left is right. Discrimination between Asians? Totally fine, zero attention, can't be true.

Two husbands without kids, working in tech, have a huge amount of cash, time capacity and ideation opportunity. I felt these added up to a huge advantage for getting quality shit done and taking risks. Fair play.

Are we done blaming tech industry ills on immigrants that we're now targeting people based on their sexual orientation? This reads like tabloid writing, focusing on irrelevant personal characteristics rather than the universal social dynamics at play.

Are there nepotism, favor trading, and walled garden clubs at play here? Yes, of course, this is a field with a lot of money exchanging hands and people are using whatever advantage they can get. Did the tech scene in the bay area attract a higher than average number of gay people? Seems like it, similar to other minorities who are over-represented for various reasons. But focusing on a "Gay mafia" instead of the more universal dynamics that allow money and power to be concentrated in a small population seems like missing the mark and directing public rage at the wrong targets.

We've done it before with targeting Jews, then lately people of Indian and east-Asian heritage, and now we seem to target gay people. If someone thinks the tech industry is not fully meritocratic, then they should tackle the dynamics that encourage that head on - the identity of the people who are over-represented will change over time, but the systemic dynamics that allow a non-meritocratic power concentration will remain.

Wired should retract this homophobic article.

It takes an issue of people in power abusing that power, and ties it to their sexuality, as if the men abuse their power because they’re gay, or as if straight men never do similarly.

Identifying abusive power structures is good, but writing about it in a way that centers the sexuality of the participants has the effect of demonizing a whole group of people unfairly.

I am appalled that Wired published this.

> This perception, for what it’s worth, runs counter to statistics: Between 2000 and 2022, the years for which data is available, only 0.5 percent of startup venture funding went to LGBTQ+ founders.

The article seems to admit that its central premise is entirely made up. If a conservative 3% of people are some flavour of gay, then they are 6-fold underrepresented, at least in this area.