I know a lot of gay people in the tech community in both SF and NYC (and at MIT). Not many lesbians, but that's due to lack of women overall (and they are probably well represented in the overall small number of female engineers).
A surprisingly large number of transgendered people. My first contact with a transgendered person was finding out the ~40 year old female IRCop on EFnet who was married to a woman was originally a man. Really confusing for a 13yo, but it was great to first encounter someone that different from me in a safe setting where I already respected that person's technical competence and general reasonableness.
It's kind of funny that in the military, where the whole LGBT rights thing was a big issue, one of the biggest predictors of "would you be ok with LGBT openly serving" was "did you know someone who was LGBT and a good soldier otherwise" -- if the first gay person you met was some horrible example of humanity independent of being gay, it was pretty easy to assume all gay people would be like that. If the first one was a great soldier (like 1LT Dan Choi), you'd be more likely to support gay soldiers as a class.
I think part of the problem with it is that most LGBT people are basically invisible about sexuality in their work settings -- which is awesome. I don't want to know about coworkers who have weird fetishes for objects, or blondes, or whatever. If it comes up in the context of "oh, I can work late, my husband will take the kids..", that's a great way to learn a coworker is gay. It isn't something you need to hide, but in a work setting, there's no reason to flaunt any traits unrelated to work.
A surprisingly large number of transgendered people. My first contact with a transgendered person was finding out the ~40 year old female IRCop on EFnet who was married to a woman was originally a man. Really confusing for a 13yo, but it was great to first encounter someone that different from me in a safe setting where I already respected that person's technical competence and general reasonableness.
It's kind of funny that in the military, where the whole LGBT rights thing was a big issue, one of the biggest predictors of "would you be ok with LGBT openly serving" was "did you know someone who was LGBT and a good soldier otherwise" -- if the first gay person you met was some horrible example of humanity independent of being gay, it was pretty easy to assume all gay people would be like that. If the first one was a great soldier (like 1LT Dan Choi), you'd be more likely to support gay soldiers as a class.
I think part of the problem with it is that most LGBT people are basically invisible about sexuality in their work settings -- which is awesome. I don't want to know about coworkers who have weird fetishes for objects, or blondes, or whatever. If it comes up in the context of "oh, I can work late, my husband will take the kids..", that's a great way to learn a coworker is gay. It isn't something you need to hide, but in a work setting, there's no reason to flaunt any traits unrelated to work.