I personally cannot tolerate conversations with cis het men except for a select few. And that is the experience of most of my gay, lesbian, trans, or any queer or gender diverse friends of mine. And all of them would cite the same reason, “They’re just so stuuupid.” But as an empath, it was my duty to look at the data and conclude based on facts and science.
Turns out it is not true. There are many studies which basically, just like we would, conclude that all men are the same. But after going deep into google scholar and doing a lil bit of ChatGPT research, I have cherry-picked 5 Studies and here’s What They Say.
Study #1: Gay men had higher college GPAs than straight men.
A 2022 study by sociologist Joel Mittleman at the University of Notre Dame looked at nationally representative US data to compare educational outcomes across sexual-orientation groups. The study used official transcript records and gay men’s average GPA was about 0.15 points higher than straight men’s. This is Big because for reference, having at least one college-educated parent was associated with only about a 0.06-point GPA difference.
Now, before you say that maybe only high-achieving gay men make it to college, the study looked at that too. And across multiple nationally representative datasets, gay men showed higher rates of:
college attendance
bachelor’s-degree attainment
graduate-degree attainment
academic achievement
So this wasn’t gay men entering college and then just getting good grades. Some of the academic gap was already visible before college.
Study #1.5: Gay boys were already showing higher academic achievement during adolescence
Mittleman’s study also found that around 52% of gay men had bachelor’s degrees, compared with around 35% of straight men. That’s a huuuugee gap. And it wasn’t limited to one racial group. The bachelor’s-degree advantage appeared among the major racial/ethnic groups examined in the study. We love a committed academic, amirite gays?
Source: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00031224221075776
Study #3: Gay boys outperformed heterosexual boys academically.
A 2025 study using Britain’s Millennium Cohort Study looked at teenagers aged 16–18 and compared educational outcomes by sexual orientation. And once again: They also had higher educational expectations. No mo explanations needed.
Source: https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/42/2/301/8317978
Study #4: It doesn’t end at GPA.
The cognitive research is much messier. A huge meta-analysis covering 106 samples and more than 250,000 participants found differences between heterosexual and homosexual men on certain cognitive tasks.
The interesting bit is that it wasn’t overall intelligence. It was specific cognitive abilities like spatial cognition. On some traditionally male-favouring spatial tasks, heterosexual men performed better than gay men. But on some female-favouring spatial tasks, gay men actually performed better than heterosexual men. Basically, our brain said no to gender roles.
Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28698022/
Study #5: Gay participants showed a reduced global-precedence effect.
Here’s a weirder one. Researchers tested gay and heterosexual participants using visual tasks that measured whether people naturally focused on the big picture or the tiny details.
Gay participants showed relatively more attention to local, detail-level information rather than automatically prioritising the overall picture.
Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21607070/
THAT’S TOO MUCH SCIENCE. Let’s take a pause.
So, all of this doesn’t actually mean gay men are smarter.
What the literature does show is more higher educational attainment, higher GPA in several datasets, different performance on certain cognitive tasks. So the question is: Why do gay men show unusually strong educational outcomes despite not having a demonstrated blanket IQ advantage? And THAT is where things get juicy.
I personally:
May have tried to compensate for stigma or social marginalisation by investing heavily in academic achievement.
Did it because I thought educational, socioeconomic and family factors could influence who comes out, when they come out and who gets access to higher education.
Or maybe because I assumed that studying well would give me the opportunity to GTFO my city, go abroad, and build a better life for myself.
Or maybe gender nonconformity, personality and developmental factors are interacting with sexual orientation in ways we don’t fully understand yet.
Anyway what do y’all think gaybies?
Also I’m not thrilled that so much of this research excludes or sidelines bi men, pan men and trans men… here’s hoping newer studies stop treating the queer spectrum like a two-option dropdown.
