“Gays run this joint”: Penetrating deep inside Silicon Valley’s “gay tech mafia”
Apparently gay men thrive in the top tiers of Silicon Valley. Does it matter?
Mark
As has become all too apparent from the current political climate, the gays aren’t being put in charge of enough institutions these days. Straight men are ruining everything from finance to politics to streaming—but in Silicon Valley, “gays run [the] joint,” according to a new exposé from Wired.
There have been rumblings about an elite gay tech autocracy in Silicon Valley for quite some time now, even before gay tech billionaire Peter Thiel was outed by Gawker way back in 2007. But as Zoë Bernard’s reporting is quick to point out, reports of a “shadowy cabal” of gay men running the tech industry have always felt a bit… you know… homophobic. But according to one interviewee, it’s also pretty much true. “The only way to catch a break,” in the industry these days, he says, “is if you’re gay.”
Is Silicon Valley—where one AI firm is consistently referred to as “twink town”—actually playing out a reversal of how it usually works in the real world? According to Bernard’s interview subjects, it would seem that way, even for the ostensibly straight power players of the tech world.
Last fall, a notorious (now-deleted) photo of Y combinator CEO Garry Tan featured a group of young men chilling in Tan’s sauna, and though Tan, according to one source, is “straight straight straight,” viewers felt like he was trying to sum up the appeal of the tech capital in visual terms: leisure, twinks, and private saunas aplenty.
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Tan comes from the same firm that gave us Thiel, one of the most notable gay billionaires of the tech world to emerge in the past 20 years. But according to Bernard’s sources, Thiel is more the rule than the exception at this point. “Anyone in Silicon Valley who has achieved outsize success,” multiple people told the reporter ahead of the piece, “is probably gay.”
They’re also all hanging out together, apparently. “We run the tech mafia (see Apple, OpenAI),” writes Substacker Jack Randall on the newsletter Friend Of. “We hold top government posts (see the Treasury Secretary). We anchor primetime news and the NYE Ball Drop. Our dating app’s stock outperforms its straight peers. And in the US, gay men are, on average, better educated and wealthier than the general population.”
Some of the queer power players in Silicon Valley are even trying to create a networking app called Sector with the ultimate aim of “replac[ing] Grindr.”
Great, we’ve established that gay men thrive in Silicon Valley. The next big question is: does it matter? What’s the difference between a bunch of super rich and powerful gay men and their straight counterparts in other areas of business?
If the Epstein files is anything to go on, not much. Bernard heard reports of “ecstasy, psychedelic fueled gay sex stuff” as well as coercion and plenty of d*ck pic exchanges from sources who claim to have seen it happen firsthand, but it doesn’t feel that different from what we know about rich people of any sexuality when they get together on a private island with unlimited funds and the promise of sex. There’s nothing surprising about learning how the ultra rich spend their money, whether on eternal life treatments or drugged-out sex parties. The bigger question in all of this is: how are these super-wealthy gay tech scions using their funds? How are they voting? Are they all, you know, Republicans?
Unsurprisingly, it would seem that way.
“They are assumed to prize aesthetics and the masculine physique, scorn identity politics, reject DEI in favor of MEI—“merit, excellence, and intelligence”—and lean right-wing, if not MAGA,” Bernard reports. She notes that while only 0.5% of startup funds in the last 22 years have gone to openly LGBTQ+ ventures and creators, the men behind the scenes who “happen” to be gay have been thriving, possibly due to their ability to separate queer politics from the pursuit of making big money.
“Cis gay men are the biggest gay group within the acronym, and it is much harder for other letters,” says Out Professionals founder Danny Gray. That Thiel-like ability to separate one’s historical oppression from the desire to make bank might be a large part of that equation.
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