High Tech Gays (HTG)
High Tech Gays (HTG) was a Silicon Valley LGBTQ social and activist organization from 1983 to 1997. It held monthly business meetings attended by hundreds. Members enjoyed social outings, assisted each other in job searches and some became very active in the LGBTQ rights movement. March on Washington 1987San Jose ...
LGBTQ+ Tech Employees
The diverse, liberal work climates touted by Silicon Valley’s high-tech companies first began with a push for increased civil rights by gay and lesbian employees in the 1980s. As companies like Apple and HP advocated for internal nondiscrimination policies and domestic partner benefits, news spread through the software, hardware and ...
Rick Rudy
Today, the tech industry is hailed as a model of inclusiveness. It is considered to be one of the most LGBTQ-friendly industries in the U.S. The CEO of the world’s most valuable tech company, Apple, is gay. This reputation did not happen naturally or overnight. It took years of struggle ...
Kim Harris and Bennet Marks
Kim Harris is a computer scientist and gay rights activist based out of Sunnyvale, California. Born in 1946, he studied physics at Louisiana State University, later earning his masters in computer science at Purdue. The Texas native moved to the Bay Area in 1974 to work on a super computer ...
Digital Queers
If the South Bay was home to changing internal policies, San Francisco became the hub for disseminating those ideas beyond Silicon Valley. Larger conventions and gatherings emerged in the early 1990s, including the first Out and Equal workplace conference in October 1991. From there, collectives like the National Lesbian and ...
Elizabeth Birch
As a lawyer, corporate executive and open lesbian, Elizabeth Birch helped coordinate LGBT company policies and guide cultural perspectives of the queer community on a national scale throughout the 1980s and 90s. While activists and LGBTQ+ workers pushed for civil rights, she used her legal expertise to solidify changes and ...