Apple (AAPL) on Thursday offered the public a rare and surprisingly intimate look at some of the people who help make its products.

As their contribution to the “It Gets Better” website, more than a dozen gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Apple employees talked on camera about how they managed to survive high school.

The It Gets Better Project was founded in Sept. 2010 by columnist Dan Savage in response to the suicide of a 15-year-old boy who had been bullied for being gay. The website has since gathered more than 10,000 user-generated and professionally produced videos of support including, early on, one from President Obama.

Apple has a reputation in Silicon Valley as a GLBT-friendly employer, extending to all the benefits enjoyed by heterosexual married couples.

Its video was briefly pulled from YouTube Saturday morning as a “depiction of harmful activities” (sic), but by 11:00 a.m. it was back up. There’s a copy below the fold. In the event it gets pulled again, a mirror version is available on Vimeo here.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWYqsaJk_U8]

Via: Daring Fireball

Google (GOOG) contributed its own video in October (see here) and Adobe did one in December (see here).

Also on Fortune.com:

• Roger McNamee loves the iPad
• The PC market as a giraffe
• The triumph of ‘good enough’ computing

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]