Gay men have long been rumored to run Silicon Valley. No one can say exactly when, or if, gay men started running Silicon Valley. They seem to have dominated its upper ranks at least the past five years, maybe more. On platforms like X, the clues are there: whispers of private-island retreats, tech executives going "gay for clout," and the suggestion that a "seed round" is not, strictly speaking, a financial term. It is an idea so taken for granted, in fact, that when I call up a well-connected hedge fund manager to ask his thoughts about what is sometimes referred to in industry circles as the "gay tech mafia," he audibly yawns. "This has always been the case." It had been the case, the hedge funder says, back in 2012, when he was raising money from a venture capitalist whose office was staffed with dozens of "attractive, strong young men," all of whom were "under 30" and looked as though they had freshly decamped from "the high school debate club." "They were all sleeping with each other and starting companies," he says. And it is absolutely the case now, he adds, when gay men are running influential companies in Silicon Valley and maintain entire social calendars with scarcely a straight man, much less a woman, in sight. "Of course the gay tech mafia exists," he continues. "This is not some Illuminati conspiracy theory. And you do not have to be gay to join. They like straight guys who sleep with them even more." Ever since I started covering Silicon Valley in 2017, I've heard variations of this rumor--that "gays," as an AI founder named Emmett Chen-Ran has quipped, "run this joint." On its face, a gay tech mafia seemed too dumb to warrant actual investigative inquiry.

In addition to properties discussed in section 3.3, here we show that equizero models have auto-regressive and invertibility properties. E.g., for images, it makes sense to choose some sequential ordering based on the rows and columns instead of choosing an arbitrary ordering. Using a counterexample in Ex. 1, we show that if a given model Next, we prove that equizero in equation 2 retains the autoregressive property of any model M . However, as we discuss next in Prop. We leave this for future work.

Grindr, the dating app that caters to gay men, cannot be held responsible for the rape of a 15-year-old boy who the company matched with sexual predators, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week; it is the latest teens-versus-tech spat in a fight over internet immunity experts say could soon come before the U.S. Supreme Court. The appellate court's ruling upheld a 2023 decision by U.S. District Judge Otis D. Wright II of the Central District of California, who dismissed the suit, saying Grindr was shielded by broad immunity protections passed almost a decade before the plaintiff was born. In a series of events Wright called "alarming and tragic," a closeted Nova Scotia teen downloaded the LGBTQ hookup app in an attempt to meet other gay kids in his rural Canadian town. Instead, over the course of four days, he was assaulted by four adult men, including a man who picked him up after the teen sent him pictures from his high school cafeteria. LGBTQ social networking platform Grindr last year told its all-remote staff they had to return to the office or lose their jobs.

Yes, San Francisco is a nexus of artificial intelligence innovation, but it's also one of the queerest cities in America. The Mission District, where ChatGPT maker OpenAI is headquartered, butts up against the Castro, where sidewalk crossings are coated with rainbows, and older nude men are often seen milling about. And queer people are joining the AI revolution. "So many people in this field are gay men, which is something I think few people talk about," says Spencer Kaplan, an anthropologist and PhD student at Yale who moved to San Francisco to study the developers building generative tools. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is gay; he married his husband last year in a private, beachfront ceremony.

One of pop culture's early but most seminal depictions of gay online dating comes from a 1999 episode of Sex and the City. Stanford Blatch, Carrie Bradshaw's gay friend, played by the late Willie Garson, is seeking advice. He's been chatting to another man on an online chatroom – the height of technology at the time – and wonders whether they should meet up. "What do you know about him?" asks Bradshaw. "Well, his name is bigtool4u" answers Blatch – cue hysterics from Bradshaw.

But however revolutionary their deaths might be for the universe of "The Last of Us," they still fall into well-worn gay death tropes. It seems that Bill is older than Frank, but Frank succumbs to an unspecified illness and ends up infirm, which ultimately prompts his suicide. If you grew up queer in the 80s and 90s, the image of one gay man pushing another in a wheelchair might look fiercely familiar from the early days of the AIDS crisis and the storytelling that came out of it. Many cis gay men of my generation believed this kind of death was inevitable, that they would die tended to by a lover or they would be the widower left behind. Bill rebels against this trope by dying alongside Frank, but as I watched (and cried) as Bill wheeled Frank around their house and handed him his pills, I thought of how many times I had seen this scene in other movies and television. I wondered why the show's creators chose to have Frank sicken to lead to Bill and Frank's deaths when one or both of their ages could have been the inciting factor.

On a recent episode of Dr. Phil, the host spoke with some of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims and showed them an interview he filmed with the father of one of America's most infamous serial killers. A 21-year-old Louisiana man has been sentenced to 45 years in prison after plotting a Jeffrey Dahmer-like scheme to meet men on the gay dating app Grindr and kill them, according to federal officials. Chance Seneca of Lafayette Parish targeted one particular victim, as well as other gay men, through the app in 2020 because of their sexual orientation and gender, the Justice Department said. "The facts of this case are truly shocking, and the defendant's decision to specifically target gay men is a disturbing reminder of the unique prejudices and dangers facing the LGBTQ community today," Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division said in a Wednesday statement. Clarke continued: "The internet should be accessible and safe for all Americans, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation. We will continue to identify and intercept the predators who weaponize online platforms to target LGBTQ victims and carry out acts of violence and hate."

This piece is part of Outward, Slate's home for coverage of LGBTQ life, thought, and culture. I've had a lot of dick in my DMs. Lopsided dicks caught pallid in the camera's harsh flash. Let me tell you: The onslaught has been relentless. I have had the full variety of male organ paraded before me.

Fresh from a drag performance featuring a gender-swapped Mario and Princess Peach chasing each other around on stage, after watching a burlesque performer disrobe to the Tetris theme, I am standing at the bar waiting for a drink, surrounded by people in fabulous outfits. Famous drag queen Asstina Mandella is here in a stunning dress; I am in a purple bisexual-colours suit and I still feel somewhat underdressed for the occasion. I am not used to this at video games events – back in the 00s, it was mostly men in black T-shirts with logos on them, and I was one of about three women in the room. But this is the first in-person Gayming awards, an event that celebrates queer representation in video games, and the huge and ever-growing queer community that plays them. This might not be what some people would think of as the gaming audience, but the fact is that just about everybody plays games now – two-thirds of all Americans, to pluck just one stat – and of course, queer people have always been part of that community.