After playing the nerd card last week against Rudy "I’m a giant nerd" Giuliani, I felt a bit guilty, because although it’s true that "most nerds, like most people, are not ennobled by their experience of being persecuted," it’s also true that some of them are.
Take, for instance, mega-nerd, mega-rich Tim Gill, the founder of Quark publishing software and, as this fine article in the Atlantic explains, perhaps the savviest stealth gay rights activist in the country. Gill’s nerd-dom, at this point is his very successful career, seems to have diminished, but it’s a subtext to the article. "In our conversations," writes the article’s author, Gill "gave the impression of someone who feels he has been picked on and now, having acquired the means, fully intends to do something about it."
The difference between someone like Gill and someone like Giuliani, it becomes clear, is what they did with their trauma, with their sense of having been victimized. Giuliani’s repressed the pain, and sublimated it by fighting to get to a place where he can exert over others the power, and the dominance, that was once exerted over him. Gill, on the other hand, doesn’t pretend that he didn’t suffer, and he’s now fighting to remove from power the kinds of people who once victimized him.
He targets the worst of the homophobic worst at the state and local levels — the men and women who introduce, rather than just end up voting for, the nasty anti-gay legislation — and quietly directs a national network of wealthy gay donors to contribute modest sums to those people’s opponents. The small amounts, collectively, really make a difference in these small races but the sums, individually, are rarely large enough to catch the attention of the homophobe’s campaign (or in some cases even of the campaign benefiting from the money). The result, then, is a series of well-financed campaigns to defeat bigots that don’t end up, on the surface, revolving around gay rights issues.
“The strategic piece of the puzzle we’d been missing—consistent across almost every legislature we examined—is that it’s often just a handful of people, two or three, who introduce the most outrageous legislation and force the rest of their colleagues to vote on it,” Gill explained. “If you could reach these few people or neutralize them by flipping the chamber to leaders who would block bad legislation, you’d have a dramatic effect.”
…Another element of this strategy is stealth. Revealing targets only after an election makes it impossible for them to fight back and sends a message to other politicians that attacking gays could put them in the crosshairs.
… In the 2006 elections, on a level where a few thousand dollars can decide a close race, Gill’s universe of donors injected more than $3 million, providing in some cases more than 20 percent of a candidate’s or organization’s budget. On Election Day, fifty of the seventy targeted candidates were defeated … out of the thirteen states where Gill and his allies invested, four—Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Washington—saw control of at least one legislative chamber switch to the Democratic Party.
