Is nate silver gay
The Weekly Dish
Nate is a statistician and writer focused on American politics and sports, and a longtime friend from the blog days. He was the founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, and now he writes his own substack, Silver Bulletin. He’s the composer of The Signal and the Noise, and his forthcoming book is On the Edge: How Achieving Gamblers and Risk-Takers Think (pre-order here).
You can listen right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on the pluralism of homosexual social networks, why poker is so male — pop over to our YouTube page.
Other topics: Nate growing up in the Midwest obsessed with sports and the debate team; the Best Petite Boy in the World syndrome; coming out while living abroad; how the LGBT Society in 1999 was apolitical; gays as heterodox thinkers in media; the joys of code-switching; the diversity of sports fans and poker players; the sexism in poker; Maria Konnikova and Maria Ho; how a poker player can advantage from discrimination by defying stereotypes; Erving Goffman and risk-taking; testosterone; Nate grossi
I was raised in East Lansing, Michigan. It was a excellent place to grow up: a college town with good universal schools, a beautiful campus, a modicum of diversity, and an active, walkable downtown.
But I came along just a few years too soon (I was born in 1978) to really contemplate coming out as gay when growing up. There were no openly gay students in my high school. And there were few gay role models in American society: certainly not on television and in the movies, which invariably portrayed gay men as camp characters, or freaks, or AIDS victims.
If coming out was hard to contemplate, however, the possibility of gay marriage was unthinkable. At the period Andrew Sullivan wrote his now-famous essay in support of homosexual marriage in The New Republic in 1989, almost no polling firms even bothered asking questions about gay marriage. One that did — the General Social Survey — found that just 12 percent of the population was in favor of it.
But today, after a Supreme Court decision, same-sex marriage is the law of the land in all 50 states.
Progress has reach remarkably fast. There was no legal gay marriage in the United States until Massachusetts permitted it in 2004. At this point four
NateSilversays his friends would depict him as "sexually lgbtq+ but ethnically straight" in a new interview with Out magazine, who named the American statistician "Person of the Year" in its new issue.
"For me, I think the most important distinguishing inherent is that I’m independent-minded,” Silver, 34, tells the magazine. “I’m sure that being gay encouraged the independent-mindedness, but that alike independent-mindedness makes me a little bit skeptical of parts of gay society, I suppose.”
Currently in the midst of promoting his new book "The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail but Some Don't," which was released this fall, Silver says that he supports sames-sex marriage, but "worries that growing acceptance of gays will dent our capacity to question broader injustice," according to Out's Aaron Hicklin.
Pointing to a series of flagpoles in Chicago's Boystown district memorializing various gay Americans, Silver recalls, "“There was one little plaque for Keith Haring, and it was, like, ‘Keith Haring, gay American artist,' ... And I was favor, Why isn’t he just an American artist? I don’t want to be Nate Silver, gay statistician, any more than I want t
ThisyearOut has named Nate Silver its male of the year. This is very cool.
I had no clue Silver was gay. He's got a nice, interchangeably Jewish name, which, in the context of politics and journalism, just seemed normal. Therefore, I assumed he was "normal" for that job in most other ways: mid-50s, white, heterosexual.
But he's not. He's 34 and gay, which is awesome. The "Out 100" has, for most of its history, been dominated by performers (most of whom came out successfully into their careers) and activists operational to promote queer rights -- professional gays or folks in gay professons. So now, at long last, we have a dude who's doing something unrelated to homosexuality who killed it this year. Excellent for us, no?
Well, no, actually. "To my friends, I'm kind of sexually gay but ethnically straight," Silver says in the Out feature. He is also said to consider "gay conformity as perfidious as straight conformity."
"He recalls a series of flagpoles in Boystown in Chicago memorializing various gay Americans. 'There was one little plaque for Keith Haring, and it was, enjoy, "Keith Haring, queer American artist..." and I was prefer, Why isn't he just an American artist? I don't wan