All the ways in which the fired Google engineer has suffered like a gay man in the 1950s

A little earlier this month, an internal memo that had been circulated within Google was leaked to the public. The memo made certain controversial assertions about diversity, rather sweeping distinctions between men and women, and drew considerable criticism from many quarters – including from some of the authors of research upon which it claimed to be based.

In an interview with Business Insider's Steve Kovach, the now infamous James Damore (the Googler, or technically now Xoogler, who originally penned and circulated this memo) has drawn a parallel that at first glance might not seem an obvious one.

"Really, it’s like being gay in the 1950s. These conservatives have to stay in the closet and have to mask who they really are."

Of course the flock of harpies that is the left-wing twitterati are already feasting on this, but I'm here to say James – I understand. Your plight is absolutely equivalent to that of gay men in the 1950s. Allow me to elaborate.

In the 1950s, to be a gay man in America was to feel that the whole world was against you. At that time homosexuality was regarded as a mental illness by the majority of the psychiatric community – homosexuality was listed in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) under paraphilia ("sexual deviance") – and so gay men were routinely subjected to a variety of "treatments" designed to cure their homosexuality. Just like you, though, there is nothing to "cure" – it's just who you are.

It wasn't just the medical profession who were railing against gay men in the 1950s – the police, too, were doing everything they could to make their lives hell. Raids on bars were commonplace, arrests for "lewd conduct" and "sodomy" were a practically daily occurrence, and in Iowa a law was even enacted to facilitate the arrest of gay men as "sexual psychopaths". It was also very common to be fired for being gay – in fact from 1953 "sexual perversion" constituted legal grounds for investigation and dismissal of state employees. Having recently lost your job for similar reasons, I'm sure this is something you can relate to.

If all this wasn't enough, your family would probably have ostracised you too if you had been a gay man – egged on by naïve interpretations of religious texts and a vicious deep-seated homophobia that was the norm at the time. If you were married and had children and came out as gay, it's likely that you would have lost all rights to see your children, and the law would have facilitated this.

As a straight white man working in Silicon Valley, I can't begin to imagine how crushingly oppressed you must have felt. With the law and systems rigged against you, the threat of imprisonment a daily reality, medical professionals trying to cure you, facing total abandonment by your family – not to mention being condemned to hell by pretty much every religious institution – it must have been very difficult for you, and I'm so glad to read that you are at least now free of that. You have spent so long in the closet, as you put it, masked and hidden. Now, at least, you no longer have to wear a mask and we can all see you for who you are. Good luck!