From Closeted Citizens to Activists: High Tech Gays and the Fight for LGBTQ+ Equality in Silicon Valley

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.

Carroll had worked for AT&T/Bell Labs for 35 years in locations around the world, including Japan, the Caribbean, Iceland, Hawaii, and Alaska, before settling in Silicon Valley in the early 1980s. Bell Labs had expanded its non-discrimination policy, adding sexuality in 1975. However, the company did so quietly, so quietly that most employees remained unaware of it. Most of its LGBTQ workers remained closeted, including Carroll, who held a top-secret clearance at the time. In 1982, employees formed Lesbian and Gay United Employee (LEAGUE), and while Bell Labs denied it recognition, LEAGUE became one of the largest employee resource groups in the nation, seeking to build community internally while also advocating for company leaders to expand upon its 1975 non-discrimination policy, according to Canaday. Despite the early adoption of the non-discrimination cause and the formation of LEAGUE, “I very much assumed that Bell Labs…would have fired me or laid me off right away,” notes Carroll.

In the early 1980s, Silicon Valley’s general aversion to homosexuality was evident. Despite earlier victories, such as the 1978 defeat of the Briggs Prop 6 amendment that sought to remove gay and lesbian teachers from California classrooms, the end of the decade ushered in a more hostile reality. Efforts to pass a Gay Pride declaration withered in the face of public opposition, while the attempted enactment of two measures protecting the LGBTQ community from housing and employment discrimination, after passage in 1979, were defeated in 1980 after local conservative groups protested the passage of the ordinances and won second vote before their enactment.

While the defeat of the non-discrimination ordinances chilled activism among Silicon Valley’s gay and lesbian residents, LGBTQ life in San Jose and its suburbs persisted quietly, in the form of the Lambda Association, the gay publication Our Town, and a smattering of gay and lesbian bars in downtown San Jose. But it was hardly paradise. “San Jose had a pretty lousy downtown back then…it was just a horrible, horrible place,” remembers Carroll. “[T]here were bars on the outskirts in the warehouse area so to speak, gay bars that we went to, but the real fun was always in [San Francisco].”

The Founding of High Tech Gays

Even though gay and lesbian bars offered respite and community to many men and women over the decades, others in the community eschewed drinking or desired companionship and comradery in other spaces, particularly in the wake of AIDS. This desire for another kind of space is what spurred the created of High Tech Gays.

“Since the disease seems to be sexually transmitted, those meeting places that cater to sexual contact, the bars and baths, are losing patronage,” HTG president Rick Rudy wrote in one of the organization’s first newsletters in 1983. “Where can they turn to meet other gay people in a less threatening environment? I would suggest that social and political groups, like High Tech Gays, may be the answer.”

Most of HTG’s early meetings took place in Carroll’s condo with roughly 16 members, but quickly grew. By 1986, its monthly meetings had moved to the Billy DeFrank Center and regularly drew over 100 people. At its height in the late 1980s, HTG membership topped 700, and the mailing list exceeded, 1,100 households, according to the HTG August 1987 newsletter. In 1987, The Advocate described it as the “biggest gay technical professional group in the world.” Members hailed from more than 16 companies, including Atari, Intel, Western Electric, Lockheed, HP, IBM, GTE Sylvania, and G.E. National Semi-Conductor.

White men made up between 80 to 85 percent of HTG membership, with women accounting for roughly ten percent and non-whites somewhere under ten percent. According to Correa, non-white membership, though small, was diverse and included African Americans, Latinos, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and other Asians.

Monthly meetings typically included a speaker and pot luck dinner, but though politics came up, it was not the central organizing principle of HTG. “The meetings were purely social,” remembers Correra. HTG organized regular outings such as ski trips, Pride marches, day tours, plays, and other group events. However, their social events did wield a political edge, such as when they would descend upon a restaurant with 20 members unconcerned with the establishment’s opinions regarding the LGBTQ community. “We did a lot of takeovers. We educated a lot of people,” notes Correa.

Becoming More Than Just a Social Club

Despite the organization’s social focus, politics did come up at meetings. Members would raise issues, discuss them, and then have HTG members vote on next steps. Over time, as HTG grew, it drew candidates for office at the municipal, state, and federal level. “Anytime we could get involved in local politics we would,” Carroll notes. “We became sort of the representatives of the gay community.”

By all accounts, president Rick Rudy drove HTG’s political discussions. “Rick Rudy was really the one who knew the pulse of what was going on.…He would lead the group to consider ideas [that] would generally come from him,” remembers Correa. Rudy led the organization from 1983 until October 1990, when he passed from complications of AIDS. Rudy’s advocacy within HTG increased following his election in 1985 to the board of directors for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF, today known as the National LGBTQ Task Force), the nation’s oldest LGBTQ rights organization. Rudy established dialogues with local elected officials and the police force, even inviting the police chief to speak at HTG meetings, particularly on the issue of anti-gay violence.

Throughout its existence, the tension between HTG’s dual role as a social group and as a political force persisted. In order to address this tension, HTG formed the Political and Business Action Committee (PABAC) in 1984 for more politically inclined members. In 1984, PABAC organized a letter writing campaign to over 100 companies in Silicon Valley. The campaign first sought to research the policies held across the industry regarding non-discrimination and then push for more inclusive policies and other similar protections. This process was repeated in subsequent years. Some companies like Apple and Univation responded positively, pointing out they already included sexual orientation in their non-discrimination policies. Others failed to respond at all and some responded hostilely. “I don’t care what the state law is, I won’t hire any homosexuals,” wrote one personnel manager in response, Carroll recounts. “In other cases we got stuff written across the top, ‘Go Die Fags’ that kind of stuff,” Carroll recounts.

 A High-Profile Lawsuit

The High Tech Gays may be best known for a lawsuit they eventually lost. In 1984, HTG member Tim Dooling appealed to the organization for support in his class action lawsuit against the government for its biased security clearance appeal process, which had ultimately led to his dismissal from his job. Dating back to President Dwight Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, homosexuality had been classified as a threat to national security, resulting in thousands of gay men and women being denied employment not only in government but outside it as well. Months of discussion led to HTG joining the suit.

Although the organization was eventually removed from the litigation for lack of standing, its name remained on the suit, and they were able to help fundraise to defray costs for litigants. Dooling and others won an initial decision in United States District Court for the 9^th Circuit, before losing on appeal. Despite being overturned, the case resulted in policy changes within parts of the government and contributed to a long line of legal challenges by the LGBTQ community to the clearance process. It eventually culminated in President Clinton’s Executive Order 12968 in 1995, which prohibited the use of sexual orientation as grounds for denial of clearance.

HTG’s Influence Spreads to Other Groups

At the same time, several members of HTG, including Greg Gloss (Hewlett-Packard) and Don Nelson (Lockheed), established LGBTQ employee resource groups at their place of employment. While HTG President Rick Rudy and others frequently met with industry leaders to push for these policies, Rudy recognized the importance of these employee groups. Pressuring from the outside alone was ineffective. “If employees ask for it, they feel like they’re making a positive change for their own family,” Rudy told the Bay Area Reporter in 1989.

High Tech Gays also spawned other politically oriented organizations. Two members, Wiggsy Sivertsen and Ken Yeager founded the Bay Area Municipal Elections Committee in 1984. During BAYMEC’s first 18 months, Sivertsen made several appeals at meetings for support, and by 1987, numerous HTG members, including Rudy, had joined the organization. Later, as part of BAYMEC, Rudy regularly lobbied elected officials over policies. HTG lobbying, the work of employee resource groups, and efforts by BAYMEC resulted in companies adopting non-discrimination policies, including IBM in 1987 and Sun Microsystems in 1988, among others.

By the early 1990s, the culmination of these efforts led even corporations that had been historically resistant to non-discrimination policies such as Hewlett-Packard and Lockheed to change their policies. As a 1991 New York Times article acknowledged, “many of the area’s corporate gay groups trace their genesis to High Tech Gays.” A year later, California Governor Pete Wilson signed into law legislation that outlawed job discrimination against the LGBTQ community.

HTG Dissolves

With Rudy’s passing in 1990, the driving force behind HTG’s politics faded. The organization attempted to maintain momentum, but due to various factors, including gains by the LGBTQ community, its political focus faded. The organization folded in the late 1990s.

Despite HTG’s disappearance, its members continued to press for equality in small and large ways. Yeager and Sivertsen’s BAYMEC emerged as a political force and remains so today. Carroll and Correa eventually resettled in Santa Cruz, where they remain politically active. Both have worked to expand the city’s Diversity Center, which pushes to extend protections to the LGBTQ+ community.

Perhaps HTG’s greatest contribution was creating activists out of once closeted citizens. “The fact at that time is we weren’t even thinking about being politically active,” remembers Carroll. Because of High Tech Gays, “We weren’t political activists, and yet we did become political activists.”