Lots of entrepreneurs would like to pick Chip Conley’s brain. But when several dozen gathered in November to meet the founder of Joie de Vivre, a boutique hotel chain that he said had $220 million in revenue last year, their questions were not just about the nuts and bolts of running a company.

They also asked: How do you come out of the closet in your business? And how do you handle investors who might be uncomfortable with your vocal support of gay rights?

Conley, 49, who came out four years before he opened his first hotel, the Phoenix, in 1987, recounted steering such investors to the website of Kimpton Hotels, a competitor that promotes its support for gay employees.

Then he told them that one of Kimpton’s biggest investors was a former Senate Republican leader, Bill Frist. That example, Conley recalled, was enough to ease the investors’ concerns.

Conley’s talk was organized by StartOut, a new nonprofit networking group for gay entrepreneurs. The group, organized by a circle of friends in spring 2009, has since drawn some 1,000 participants to events in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.

Entrepreneurs come to StartOut events to network, share ideas and sip cocktails. They come to talk business in a setting free of awkward assumptions. (“What does your husband think?”) And they come to hear speakers like Conley, who serves on the group’s advisory board, or Mitchell Gold, co-founder of the furniture company Mitchell Gold & Bob Williams, or Megan Smith, vice president for new business development at Google, who is headlining a StartOut event later this month.

Darren Spedale, an investment banker-turned-serial entrepreneur in Manhattan, came up with the idea for StartOut a year ago. Spedale, most recently a founder of A-List Global Media, a company that creates media and entertainment products for adolescents, noted that plenty of other groups had entrepreneurship associations — like Astia for women or TiE for South Asians.

“Why on earth isn’t there anything like this for the gay and lesbian community?” he remembers thinking. “It was a no-brainer.”

In fact, the past decade has seen a flowering of affinity groups for gays in business. MBA candidates can get connected through Out for Business clubs at their universities and the annual Reaching Out conference, which brought more than 900 attendees to Atlanta in October.

There are about 1.2 million gay-owned businesses in the United States and about 29,000 of them belong to local gay chambers of commerce, according to Justin G. Nelson, president and a founder of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, which was organized in 2002 in Washington.

For too many years, Nelson said, the prevailing attitude among gay entrepreneurs in America was, “It’s OK for me to be gay, but I can’t do it in my business for fear that it will ruin my company.” That message, however, has evolved.

“It’s a sign of the enlightened times that we live in,” said Patrick Chung, a StartOut advisory board member, of the proliferation of gay business groups. Chung works in Menlo Park as a partner at New Enterprise Associates, a global venture capital firm. (He knows of only one other openly gay venture capitalist in Silicon Valley: Amy Errett of Maveron, who is also on the advisory board of StartOut.)

“The generation that’s coming through now, they’re more comfortable in their skin,” Chung added. “There’s been more societal support.”

StartOut has only one employee, an administrative assistant, who draws a salary. Spedale, the founder, sits on the organization’s board, but it isn’t his full-time job. The group doesn’t have an official membership roster. There are no dues, although some events require paid admission. Its e-mail list and its Facebook page have more than 1,000 subscribers.

This month, StartOut volunteers plan to teach teenagers about entrepreneurship at the Hetrick-Martin Institute, a New York City nonprofit organization that serves gay youths. Spedale and a few colleagues will play the part of investors, critiquing the teenagers as they come up with and present business ideas, discussing how to get clients, sell products and complete other entrepreneurial tasks.

StartOut connections are already paying dividends for Brian Backus. When Backus attended the group’s San Francisco kickoff event in August, he was raising seed capital for a new startup, Kidlandia, that makes personalized maps for children. In a crowd of some 300 gay entrepreneurs, he met Lorenzo Thione, a member of StartOut’s board who had sold his online search startup, Powerset, to Microsoft in 2008 and was looking for new investment opportunities.

They kept in touch. By the time Backus closed his first round of financing in October, Thione had jumped on board with a five-figure investment. Since then, Kidlandia has continued to grow, forging distribution deals with Pottery Barn and several multinational toy retailers. “It’s fantastic,” Backus said of StartOut. “You end up creating an ecosystem where people can help fund each other.”

Or maybe just find each other. In March, Emily Drabant, 28, who is completing her doctorate in neuroscience at Stanford University, listened to a StartOut talk featuring lesbian entrepreneurs. At the end, she struck up a conversation with a panelist, Carol Nast, 60, president of Enterprise Catalyst Group, a medical technology consulting firm.

Nast volunteered to serve as a mentor to Drabant through the transition from academia to industry. “I just walked out of that meeting feeling so energized,” Drabant said. “I feel like she saw things in me that I didn’t see in myself.”

Brian Elliot, the founder of the Right Side of History, a nonprofit social media platform created to promote gay rights that is to begin operating this summer, credits StartOut with helping him find Jeff Green, his third full-time employee. Green was introduced to Elliot by Gabe Zichermann, who runs the mentorship arm of StartOut.

A former vice president with Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, Green was interviewing at Google when Elliot made him an offer. “We ended up hiring him,” Elliot said. “He’s full time now, double time, actually. We’re working very hard. I’m really grateful for having been involved with StartOut.”

Zichermann, who is chief executive of a mobile software startup, BeamME, hopes that support will continue to grow — because if being gay has its challenges, so does being an entrepreneur.

“Being an entrepreneur is a very stupid thing to do,” he said. “The odds are stacked against you. One of the critical things that founders need is the fellowship of other entrepreneurs.” So far, he said, Start-Out events have felt less cutthroat — more collaborative and collegial — than other startup events he had attended.