HN is a large public forum. Any such site gets a long tail of comments—every slot on the spectrum gets represented—but absolutely not to the same degree. A minuscule minority of egregious comments does not characterize the community. Not at all.
Perceptions like this are strongly affected by cognitive biases. For example, people are far more likely to notice and remember painful data points than pleasurable ones. Therefore, a handful of (in this case) homophobic comments will make orders of magnitude more of an impression than tons of moderate, favorable, or loving ones. This is the way we're all wired [1], but it unfortunately leads people to highly distorted impressions of the community [2].
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...