The Jobs statue incident removes the last defense of the bigot: apparently, it is no longer ok to say “Some of my best friends are gay.” (OK, Jobs didn’t really have friends, but the point is still the same).
Gay Icons
Yet dismantling the Jobs statue involves a much larger, more powerful minority in Russia than the LGBT community: owners of iPhones and iPads.
Apple shocked the tech world early on by preventing a foreign company from corrupting the iPhone’s (moral) code when it refused to allow Adobe Flash. There’s a certain logic here: man-on-man sex must be so vile as to be unthinkable (straight porn suggests that lesbian sex is more than thinkable, as long as it doesn’t involve actual lesbians who know what they’re doing).
Hayden makes a point of noting that this was the result of NeXT’s insurance company “scaring them out of it with of it with doom-saying projections of how their costs would quintuple or some such nonsense.”
Hayden, however, really needed the insurance coverage and told the folks at NeXT he would unfortunately have to quit and go back to work at Oracle.
Here’s how Hayden described what happened next:
“Hold on,” the head of HR said, “Let me see what I can do.”
He worked with Steve, and they contacted the insurance company.
Every night, I used to place my iPod and my Treo next to each other, hoping they might mate in captivity. But the homophobic crusade has already extended to warnings about rainbows in children’s books, so anything is possible.
By the time the world community rushed to the defense of Russian LGBT people, the damage was already done. So now we must act preemptively, to head off an anti-Apple campaign before innocent devices are made to suffer.
To that end, I must first lay my cards on the table, and come out as an Apple loyalist.
When it comes to swallowing up its competitors, the Russian Federation has nothing on Apple.
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Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin reportedly donated $140,000 for the cause back in 2008, with Brin explaining at the time:
While we respect the strongly held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality.
Both dated Joan Baez. Where Putinists praise Russia’s “spiritual underpinnings” while decrying attempts to import foreign “cultural values,” Apple is famous for treating its technological ecosystem as a walled garden: only Apple decides what apps can run on its precious operating system, and only Apple can be trusted to protect its followers from infection by foreign viruses.
Russia bans gay propaganda.
Just for me. Now that is a straight phone. This follows on the heels of a declaration by the country’s most famous homophobe, legislator Vitaly Milonov, that Cook should be banned from Russia, because, among other things, “sodomites" spread Ebola.
If it weren’t clear enough before, this latest expression of anti-gay hysteria demonstrates how far the attempts to whip up a moral panic have drifted from considerations of what actual LGBT community members are doing with their members.
Both have been the object of a serious cult of personality, and both are notoriously undemocratic in their leadership style. Coarse, unapologeticaly unattractive—the Blackberry practically scratches its crotch and burps.
If the iPhone is to be defended from such nasty insinuations, we have to do it ourselves.
It’s so thin, so, sleek, so stylish. Both have a habit of resorting to foul, abusive language at inopportune moments. Now there can be an entire constellation of “gay” behaviors and attributes that don’t have anything to do with sex. And again, Apple isn’t alone here – a number of other prominent tech companies also received a perfect score, including AT&T, CISCO, Dell, Microsoft, Google, and Nokia.
Apple won’t compromise on equal health benefits
In the early 90’s, Apple was set to build a huge $80 million office complex in Round Rock, Texas.
Apple, along with a slew of other companies, recently leant its support to a recent filing on gay marriage that will soon be presented before the U.S. Supreme Court as the nation’s nine justices prepare to rule on the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8.
Originally put on the ballot in 2008, Proposition 8 was an initiative which sought to define marriage in California as existing exclusively between a man and a woman.
Notably, Apple is joining forces with over 60 companies all seeking to have California’s Prop 8 deemed unconstitutional.
Under the Tim Cook regime, it’s unlikely that all Grindr downloads will be replaced with a new “No Homo” app.
Let us instead recall just how much Apple and Putin’s Russia have in common. At the time, residents in the community even took to wearing pins which read, “Just Say, No! An Apple today will take family values away.”
Apple officials said [..] that as a matter of both principle and economics the company would not build on the 128-acre site in Williamson County unless the tax break is restored, and Gov.
Ann W. Richards was left pleading with the company to look at other sites in Texas. Previous versions only had heterosexual couples.
What’s more, the Human Rights Campaign Buyer’s Guide in 2012 gave Apple a perfect score with respect to its treatment of LGBT employees and overall workplace equality.
To mix American television tropes, it’s like “Will and Grace,” but nobody is willing to say “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
Which bring us back to the Steve Jobs monument: Steve Jobs’ offense is not that he had sex with men (if he did, he never mentioned it to Walter Isaacson), but that he hired as his future replacement a man who does.
