"I love gay people," said activist and playwright Larry Kramer in a 2004 speech in New York City. "I think we're smarter and more talented and more aware."A new study in the American Sociological Review (Feb. 20) poses a provocative theory that gay men are markedly for inclined to excel academically than their straight male peers.
A new study in the American Sociological Review (Feb. 20) poses a provocative theory that gay men are markedly for inclined to excel academically than their straight male peers.
In the paper, sociologist Joel Mittleman found that on an array of academic measures, gay males outperform all other groups on average, across all major racial groups. Conversely, he concluded that lesbians perform more poorly in school overall and that Black gay women have a much lower college graduation rate than their white counterparts.
“This article is focusing a lens on what we do to all kids,” Lisa Diamond, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, said of the societal pressures that appear to impede lesbians in school even as these stressors possibly unnerve gay males into compensating for homophobia through academic striving. “And the most vulnerable kids are going to show it first.”
In recent years, academics, lawmakers and journalists alike have sounded an increasingly urgent alarm that on balance, American males are stuck in a scholastic funk. As the economic gap between those with and without a college degree has widened, women’s college graduation rate has risen in tandem, but men’s rate has remained largely stagnant for decades. Today, women comprise 59.2 percent of college students, according to the National Student Clearinghouse.
Mittleman’s research indicates that this characterization of the educational gender gap is critically lacking in specificity. It is, in fact, straight males who tend to be mired in a scholastic morass. And the considerable academic progress that young women have charted since the advent of second-wave feminism has been largely restricted to the heterosexuals among them.
