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From Closeted Citizens to Activists: High Tech Gays and the Fight for LGBTQ+ Equality in Silicon Valley
In the late 20th century, a gay social club became a major political force in the California tech industry, eventually influencing corporate policies as well as state and federal laws across the country.
In the 1980s, at a time when the federal government turned its back on the LGBTQ community, gay men and lesbians found an unlikely partner in their fight for equality: corporations.
In the face of the AIDS crisis, hostility toward LGBTQ employees forced the community to “turn from the state to business for protection, according to Margot Canaday’s Queer Career: Sexuality and Work Modern America.” Corporate America did more than federal or state governments in this regard, outpacing both the labor movement and the non-profit sector.
And it started in Silicon Valley.
While Silicon Valley was dominated by the kind of straight white men mocked in the HBO series of the same name, it also wasn’t the establishment. In these early days, for example, women made up a larger proportion of those working in computer programming. Nonconformity was seen as valuable rather than problematic. In 1987, Lotus became the “first highly visible, for-profit company” to provide same sex couples with partner benefits, according to Canaday.
Today, Silicon Valley dominates the public narrative and the economy. Granted, in our current moment, it seems paradoxical that the same industry that gave us social media platforms that often perpetuate misogyny and homophobia also served as an important battleground for the assertion of employment rights for LGBTQ workers. Yet it did, and it happened internally through employee resource groups and externally through advocacy groups.
One of the most prominent of these external advocacy organizations was the High Tech Gays (HTG). Formed in the living rooms of Silicon Valley’s San Jose in 1983, it began largely as a social group for the region’s LGTBQ tech workforce, but over time it served as an incubator for other organizations dedicated to LGBTQ political rights, inspiring members to start their own employee resource groups at their places of employment and organizing against anti-gay state referendums.
The 1980s and Silicon Valley
While San Francisco, has long been identified with LGBTQ activism, suburban Silicon Valley proved more conservative. “Even though I was ‘out’ with friends and family who knew me…I found myself being very reserved in expressing affection, talking in any depth about gay culture with them,” says Bob Correa, a California native, San Jose resident (1971-1986), and an early HTG member. “Even in the early ’80s there was a lot of prejudice back then, a heck of lot more than today,” adds his husband and one of HTG’s founders, Denny Carroll, in their 2018 interview.
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