Whose Mafia?

In February, WIRED published “Inside the Gay Tech Mafia,” by Zoë Bernard. It named Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Tim Cook, and Keith Rabois, and it described pool parties in San Francisco, deals that started on dating apps, and social circles that double as professional ones.

The illustrations of muscular torsos, a handshake coming out from between two men’s crotches, and a skyscraper standing in as a phallus were camp. The comments filled up fast. People called it homophobic. People called it gossip. People called it dangerous. People said it read like something from Gawker, or Breitbart, or the start of a new Lavender Scare.

I read it and thought none of it was about me.

I’m gay, and the subject matters. But every person named, every party described, and every network mapped in that piece lives in a world that is almost entirely white.

The piece never says so, but the illustrations show it. The bodies are white, the settings are San Francisco, and one source in the piece uses the phrase “Greco-Roman gays.”

That’s true of the industry, too. In a 2021 survey by the National Venture Capital Association and Deloitte, 84% of investment partners at U.S. venture firms were men, and 78% were white. The dinners and deals Bernard describes happen in an industry where white is the default at every level.

The men she profiles are gay, and they are also white and rich, which opens doors most queer people will never get through. Bernard wrote about one network. The reactions to her piece treated “gay” as one experience, as if the pool parties and the deals were open to any queer person interested in tech. They aren’t.

Bernard includes a statistic near the end of the piece, almost in passing. Between 2000 and 2022, only 0.5% of startup funding went to LGBTQ+ founders. She uses it to push back on the “mafia” idea. If gay people controlled tech, the number would be higher.

She’s right, and the number deserves more than a passing mention.

The figure comes from StartOut, which tracked $2.1 trillion in U.S. startup funding over those years. StartOut also found that LGBTQ+ founders who do get funded create 36% more jobs, file 114% more patents, and produce 44% more exits than the average founder, while raising 16% less money.

Inside that small share, the money splits the way it does everywhere else in venture capital. A 2023 report from Proud Ventures found that gay men raise a median of 22 times more in total funding than lesbian founders. One VC firm, Chasing Rainbows, said the gap is steepest for “intersectional queer founders, trans founders, and founders who act ‘too femme’ or ‘too butch.’”

So the “gay tech mafia” WIRED describes is real, and it is narrow. It’s a network of rich white gay men whose money, race, and kind of masculinity get them into rooms most queer people never enter.

In 2024, seven groups, including StartOut, BLCK VC, Diversity VC, and SomosVC, formed the Diversity Data Alliance to track founders’ demographics the same way across venture capital. Better tracking would be “vital” to understanding funding for founders who belong to more than one underrepresented group, StartOut wrote.

The alliance hasn’t published any funding data yet.

Black founders got 0.32% of U.S. venture dollars in 2025, according to Crunchbase. Nobody publishes a figure for founders who are Black and queer, Latinx and queer, or trans people of color.

That gap matters more now, because the money is moving into AI. Altman runs OpenAI. Thiel co-founded Palantir and was one of OpenAI’s first backers. Cook, now Apple’s executive chairman, ran the company as it built AI into the iPhone. No U.S. AI startup that raised $100 million or more in 2024 had a Black founder, according to Crunchbase.

The argument over the “gay tech mafia” assumed every queer person stands in the same place. The numbers fall off steeply, and at the bottom there’s no number at all. You can’t be underfunded if no one is tracking whether you exist.

The comments on the WIRED piece split two ways.

Some commenters called the piece homophobic. Some called it dangerous. Some said the framing, from the word “mafia” to the sexualized illustrations to the suggestion that gay men trade intimacy for business, plays into stereotypes used against queer people for decades. They have a point, especially now, with LGBTQ+ rights under political attack.

Others said Bernard was describing how power networks work, and that people were uncomfortable because of who was doing it. The strongest version of that argument is that straight men have built professional networks through social and sexual ties for centuries, and nobody called it a mafia.

Both sides argued about whether the piece was fair to gay men. Neither asked which gay men.

One commenter did. “White. You forgot to state that they are white as well as gay.”

It got almost no response.

Black gay men and other queer men of color can build networks like the ones Bernard describes, and there’s nothing wrong with being close to power. My point is that being queer doesn’t give people the same experience, the same access, or the same stakes.

The networks in that piece were built by and for one kind of gay man, in an industry that is mostly white from the top down. The funding numbers show it.

Until someone counts the rest of us, people will keep mistaking a few rich white men for everyone.

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