I assembled this list from memory, and tried to fill in the details by skimming some the news articles I could find about each event. I'm sure there are things missing from this list, and facts I've gotten wrong, so please send corrections. You can DM me on Twitter or add comments on this gist. Eventually I'd like to expand this to include key quotes from Google leadership, and indications of how incidents were or weren't resolved, and maybe make it fancy and infographic-y like this one.
Proposition 8, which ultimately took away the right to marry, from same-sex couples, is on the ballot in California. Despite the fact that Google officially opposed it, the "yes" campaign got special attention and assistance from the Google ads team. I couldn't find much news coverage or official reporting on this, and it was before I was at Google. If you have any links I should add here please comment!
When users start typing the word "bisexual" into the Google search box, it doesn't autocomplete, giving the impression that Google thinks it's a bad word, or a word only associated with porn. According to this piece from The Advocate, written in 2014 this was first noticed in 2009, was supposedly fixed in 2012, but was still failing to autocomplete in 2014.
(I'm putting this under June, the month Google+ launched, because I think this was basically a problem from day one.) Google+ requires users to use their "real name". Initially, this was frustrating for anyone who might want to go by a different name on Google+ than they do in "real life", which, as the Geek Feminism link below explains, will tend to include LGBT people among several other groups. For a while, one could simply not use Google+, and although "Just don't use it" is not an acceptable answer for a harmful product decision, it was at least possible, at first. Over the years, Google+ became more tightly integrated with other products, such as YouTube, and it was pretty easy to accidentally merge one's Google+ identity with one's YouTube identity, so the name policy could effect you even if you signed up for Google+ once and never intended to use it again.
The name policy was adjusted several times, and finally dropped altogether in 2014.
A transgender woman is outed by Google Hangouts. The Hangouts app on Android was, at the time, designed to be used both for sending Hangouts messages to other Google users who you have connected with over gmail or Google+, and also for SMS messages. When you send a Hangouts message, the recipient will see your Google+ name and picture, but when you send an SMS message they won't. Because the two modes look similar, the woman accidentally sent a Hangouts message instead of an SMS message, to a coworker, thus revealing a name which she didn't want coworkers to know her by.
Blogger all but bans users from posting porn. (While this affected anyone hosting porn blogs or self-made porn on Blogger, not just LGBT people, I'm including it here because it affected many LGBT people.) After a few days of backlash, the policy is reversed. I remember a lot of the discussion at the time being people saying, sometimes seriously, sometimes jokingly, that no one hosted their porn on Blogger anyway, it was all on Tumblr. If you were involved in the discussions back then, I encourage you to think back on them, keeping in mind what happened to porn on Tumblr just a few years later
Several LGBTQ YouTube creators discover that their videos are unavailable in Restricted Mode (YouTube's child-friendly mode) despite the videos being completely child-friendly.
According to several reports, this was fixed about a month later
A Google engineer wrote an inflammatory document, opposing Google's efforts to make its workforce diverse and inclusive. He was fired in early August and sued Google a little while later. His lawsuit included screenshots of internal discussions about his document, with full names and email addresses visible, which led to various hate sites doxxing and harassing several Googlers. Google does little to help those who were being harassed (most of whom were LGBT), leading to an increased sense that Google is not a particularly safe workplace, especially for people who are visibly queer and/or outspoken about topics like diversity and inclusion. A town hall meeting is scheduled, but gets cancelled because leadership fears it will be leaked to the same hate sites that had already doxxed several Googlers, and is never rescheduled.
Gay dating app Blued is blocked in Indonesia, following requests from the Indonesian government.
Videos relating to LGBT topics, or from LGBT creators, are often demonitized on YouTube. While the classifier that decides whether to demonitize a video is complex, informal experiments by some creators show that words like "transgender" can make a video more likely to be demonitized.
Living Hope Ministries has an anti-gay app on the app stores for both iPhone and Android. Apple takes it down but Google doesn't, until a few months later, after pressure from HRC.
Gay journalist Carlos Maza tweets about racist and homophobic harassment from YouTuber Steven Crowder. (He says it's been going on "since I started working at Vox" but I'm not sure exactly when that is, so I'm just putting this under May 2019 since that's when it became widely known.) YouTube responds on Twitter, saying, "while we found language that was clearly hurtful, the videos as posted don’t violate our policies," and takes no action against Crowder's channel. A day later, they demonetize the channel. A few days after that, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki apologizes for the hurt, but defends the company's decision.
At the time I'm writing this timeline, this story is still unfolding.
and of course the protest on parade day https://twitter.com/NoPrideForGoog/status/1145432925699133440