

Ask HN: Where are the gays at? - stevenp

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!
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corin_
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".

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stevenp
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.

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

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IsaacL
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.

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ShardPhoenix
I find the first one really surprising for some reason.

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seldo
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!

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seldo
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.

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

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mlinsey
"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.

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dmpayton
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!

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sp4rki
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.

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

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mcantor
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_.)

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corin_
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.

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mcantor
Why not both?

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corin_
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?

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mcantor
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.

~~~
corin_
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.

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

~~~
seiji
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.

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

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

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bkudria
I just disliked The Fridge the second I saw it.

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

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

