I originally wanted to QT this article with some joke or droll remark. But I couldn't think of anything, and to be honest, it wouldn't have been true to how it made me feel. This is more or less an exploration of how all the interesting and important gays in the SF tech scene congregate together and favor each other. All these powerful gays coalesce around exclusive hangouts at far-off retreats and secret saunas and wild parties to make the decisions that really matter. If you're straight, then you can be very bright, very diligent, you can have marvelous ideas, but from not being in the cabal—and you almost certainly aren't—the worse for you. The capital, the critical conversations, the popularity or the influence, that's all off-limits. So strong is this perception of nepotism that we see (otherwise straight) founders pretending to be gay for access to capital or prestige networking. But there's more to it than just that; this article comes during a certain crisis. The job market for software engineers, once lucrative and appealing just a few years ago, has now declined so precipitously due to AI that you can almost imagine CS grads screaming and kicking as they ride the drop tower down to the permanent underclass. Every major AI lab is releasing an agent designed expressly to replace the junior developer who wants to get his foot in the door. I know engineers, even principal engineers, anxious about AI taking their roles. It's a real fear and a real uncertainty, something transcending the lump of labor fallacy, that what we once expected and depended upon will soon be gone, no matter how much we study or how well we perform. Now just imagine reading this article as someone on that drop tower, someone not gay, someone not in the "gay tech cabal." To you, that cabal—occupying leadership positions at all the important tech companies and directing all the capital and founding all the notable startups—is the architects of your impending forced retirement. The titanic AI enterprises vacuum up one hundred billion dollars, five hundred billion, one trillion, seven trillion, so that they can hasten your replacement, and it becomes apparent that the winners will be either the same gays who hold the capital or the ones who can siphon it off for themselves. When you see the most preposterous and asinine startup idea nonetheless grow flush with millions in VC cash, see that the founder is a young, lean, somewhat handsome fellow, and see him pictured next to the important cabal members, then wouldn't you suspect that he escaped irrelevance not through any merit, but rather from talking with the right guy at the sauna, making eye contact with the right person at the retreat, and then, gay or straight, sleeping with the right people? Why should it be then, to you, that the SF gays who are having the time of their lives throwing around their importance and partying and sleeping around and maximizing their own pleasure and being unbearably snotty and exclusive are, all the same, destroying your future and livelihood, only rescuing those who are young and lean and promiscuous enough for them to prey upon? You're grinding LeetCode; your gay counterpart is at Barry's. You're in the fifth round of a seven-round interview process; he's being led, hand-in-hand, into a geothermal bath in Iceland. You're waiting for the recruiter to get back to you (she's long forgotten you); he's hyping up his risible business notion with someone you could only dream of meeting, someone who'd be wholly bored with you if you did. The impression is that the cabal, in the midst of their grand bacchanalia where even the drudgery of work acquires the airiness of play, has closed off both your traditional career path and your path to escaping a post-career world. Now imagine being me, a gay engineer in the Bay Area. Every now and then, someone will talk about the gay tech cabal with me in a semi-facetious manner, and I'll joke back, but there's the undertone that my being gay puts me ahead and them behind. They don't realize I'm just as behind as they are. The reality of the situation is that the gay people in SF you meet will likely be just as anxious as you are. For every immaculately groomed capitalist on a business jet, there are ten thousand Bay Area junior engineers with the same orientation. They are like you! They're just as barred from the levers of power as you are, their faces and bodies are covered in the same imperfections, and they're animated by the same longing and quiet desperation that propel all of us that Wired won't mention through life. Would you suppose the existence of a gay cabal is comfort for them with them being older, or the wrong race, or not skinny enough, or with an unfashionable facial structure, or too neurodivergent—true neurodivergence, not its fetishization—or, from inability to predict the future, having failed to make the exact right sequence of decisions at the exact right time to shield themselves from the coming chaos? To address this, I won't give you any platitude about how SF actually is meritocratic, and I certainly won't try to make the (futile, and ultimately silly) argument that gay people are the one identity group in history that transcended the cynical practice of nepotism. Rather, I'm trying to argue, beyond the outliers, that we (people like me) are no World Controllers, but instead suffer the same lack of clout you do. Beyond whatever affront to Darwinism crossed the wires in my brain to make me fall for men instead of women, I'm fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer. Your setbacks and solitudes and miseries and overarching desire to be appreciated, to be useful, to be loved, are mine as well. Is there a gay tech cabal? You won't see any evidence from me, certainly not with my paltry net worth. The only competition between me and you happens when we apply for the same job on LinkedIn. When the subjects of the Russian empire engaged in any of their myriad pogroms, they must have supposed that in their "Crusade against the Hated Race," they were striking a blow against whatever putative Jewish conspiracy was keeping them hard-pressed. In reality, they were slaughtering their neighbors: shopkeepers, farmers, scholars, fathers, mothers, and children. Though I won't fall into hysterics by saying my situation is anywhere near the severity of that, the dynamics are the same. When faced with the prospect of any identity group whose elite, in fantasy or in actuality, promotes from within, especially in the context of an economic sea change, the reaction of the aggrieved is concentrated not on the elite but rather on the identity group members most like the aggrieved themselves. I'm never going to be the person who receives an inordinately generous seed round at an orgy, but if I get promoted, or if a coworker finds out I make more than them, or if I'm offered a new position I've dreamed of, or if I do have a good idea for a startup and do get funded, what would it mean for me that the general perception is that I obtained my advancement via sexual favors? To the article's credit, it tries to maintain a balanced viewpoint. The author actually interviews a fair number of people who are not in the SF gay cabal, as much as it may exist, as well as those who ended up facing sexual harassment from its members. There's a degree of nuance. The issue is that the vast majority of people will not read it closely, as I did; they won't see that aforementioned nuance. They'll see all the anecdotes about people upturning the world for the sake of self-important hedonism and pecuniary lust and haughty insularity and sex, sex, sex. And they'll see the ridiculous images that accompany the text. Though I know what they were going for, it's impossible to think Wired could've produced pictures in worse taste. I doubt anybody involved with this article is homophobic. It's just that an increase in homophobia will probably be the net effect. Am I saying this article shouldn't have been published? Not hardly. I mean to cast no aspersions at all on the author or Wired. And I could just be having a bad reaction to it, probably not mollified by the fact I, always, am watching that great yacht of somebodies who are innately like me yet so innately unlike me cruise off into the future, leaving me marooned with the rest of humanity. Think of my yapping as more a counter-article, an "Outside the Gay Tech Mafia," if you will. It's certainly relatable to more people that way.