It is a cultural cliche that I think not entirely unsupported by reality, that gay men tend to predominate (at least, among the male workers) in some fields involving esthetic expression – fashion design, interior design, hairdressing; and in physical pursuits involving a definite element of esthetic expression, such as dancing, gymnastics, figure skating. The arts, generally. (But not in music, AFAIK. One hears stories about straight musicians much more often than stories about gay musicians; but I never heard a story about a straight fashion designer.) Why is that? Is it shaped by cultural expectations, or does the neural hard-wiring that (presumably) makes men gay also give many of them different esthetic sensibilities/interests than most straight men?
As a gay man I don’t think it’s entirely true.
I think this is what happens with professions like fashion design, interior design and hairdressing.
A young straight male might like those, but if he shows interest in them he’ll be mocked and made fun of, so he loses interest in them. A gay male will be used to being made fun of so he just goes ahead and does it anyway.
I think you hear about actors being gay simply because they have practice. Being gay means pretending you’re straight. (or at least it used to).
By the time an 18 year old gay male goes into acting he’s had 10 or more years practicing at pretending to be something he is not.
After all what is acting, pretending to be something else.
I think as gay people become accepted you will see a change in this, in the next few generations.
You’ve never heard a story about a gay fashion designer? Really? Tommy Hilfiger? Ralph Lauren? Your real point- that gay men are overrepresented in these areas- is well taken, though.
My totally unscientific WAG vis-a-vis fashion is that gay men are able to combine some skill that men are typically better at than women with the fact that they’re not as worried about cultural gender stereotypes.
ETA: pretty much what Markxxx said.
Men are typically better at fashion design than women?
On the subject of that in college I took a class on gender identity where the professor asked all of us a list of questions. She then graded us on a range of 1-5 with one extreme being the most masculine, the other being the most feminine and 3 being the median. I can’t remember if 1 or 5 was most masculine or not, but assume it was 5. Anyway, when people were graded women were all over the scale from 1-5. Men on the other hand were all limited to 3, 4, and 5. The professor said she never had a guy fall into a 1 or 2 category despite tons of women falling into the 4 and 5 category.
So in many ways culturally people are taught to suppress whatever traits they have that are socially unacceptable. So I suppose that could carry over to interior design. A guy who likes that will see it labeled ‘feminine’ and stop whereas a gay man or a woman doesn’t have to deal with that.
I wonder if there’s been any studies on brain hemispheric dominance and sexuality. Artistic expression is a right-brain speciality, so perhaps the “whatever” that causes male homosexuality also causes a predeliction towards right-brainedness. Or what about handedness? Is left-handedness (found more often males) found more frequently in lesbians than straight women?
I could do a google search, I guess.
I think there’s a lot of truth to this post.
I’m straight, but I love broadway musicals. I have from the time I was a child. But for a large part of my youth I didn’t dare mention it because of the ridicule.
It was only much later when I became a married man, with a wife who also likes musicals, that I could openly go to shows, etc.
Markxxx has a point, but when you read the autobiographies of some famous gay men when they talk about why they chose musical theatre, dance, design or whatever it’s generally because those professions “spoke” to them viscerally and inflamed their imaginations. They fixated on those those things as kids well before they knew they were gay, or what gay was, so I’m thinking that while there is a healthy “nurture” component there’s some mental “nature” wiring in place as well that move gay men in that direction more than it does heterosexual males (on average).
Having said this the counter argument is that these memoirs are usually by the more famous and successful gay men, so it would be natural for the shining light of a particular field to have an innate predilection toward their profession regardless of sexuality.
Weighing it all out I’d really have to say just based on my life impressions, there is something visceral to how strongly women attach themselves to, and receive satisfaction from, constructive and decorative arts and crafts. It’s beyond profession or social class. Women really, really like these things. If you accept the argument that the male gay brain has more female oriented tendencies and orientation than the heterosexual male brain in these things, it’s not a stretch to see the combination of male aggressiveness and female aesthetic orientations pushing gay male interests more in certain directions than others.
One of my daughter’s exes (I’m assuming he was/is straight, he is now happily married to a woman) majored in Theater in college. He was somewhat surprised to find he, a straight man, was most definitely in the minority when it came to getting jobs, and all the other guys were gay. He went into another profession, one reason being painting scenery for the local playhouse didn’t pay anything, and another was “it’s all politics, it’s who you know and who you…”.
misthought
Does it strike anyone else as curious, that so much of the business of adorning and beautifying women is in the hands of men who do not, on an emotional level, find women attractive?
Straight also, love Broadway also (I can tell you who was in the original cast for Stop the World – I Want to Get Off in 1961) and also had a few “Must be gay,” assumptions leveled at me for this, which continues to amuse me.
But I never felt I had to hide my interest or not “openly” go to shows. What did you do - wear a trenchcoat or travel to a neighboring city?
I did dinner theater after college (lighting and sound design, not on-stage work). A wise choice for any director, since my love for music is boundless, but my talent for music was… er… highly bounded, shall we say.
But I never found it tough to get work, and being one of the few straight guys in the group made my dating life quite fun.
This should have read “about a straight fashion designer”. Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren are straight.
I meant “some skill” that relates to the creative arts - spatial awareness or something, not “fashion design” or “singing”.
I always thought of them as businessmen, not designers. They do their own designs?
We leave the undressing of women to the straight guys, for the most part, though.
Well, to throw in my own wild speculation…
If one subscribes to the “helpful aunt/uncle” theory that it was evolutionarily beneficial to have a non-reproductive family member around, perhaps it would make sense that that person would be something of a perfectionist. Presumably the two biological parents were perfectly capable of raising a child and running a prehistoric family on their own, so the real advantage of the extra parent would be having someone to sweat over the details and make things run smoother. So perhaps a biological tendency towards fastidiousness accompanied the biological tendency towards same-sex attraction, and that same attention to detail helps gays excel in design and the arts.
Not at all–after all, women rely on other women, who presumably also don’t find women attractive sexually, to give us fashion advice and tell us when we look good. It has to do with objectivity–gay guys are only looking at the esthetics of female dress and adornment, there’s no sexual freighting there and as such they can look at the overall picture and tell if you’re a pulled together ensemble or a hot mess. A straight man will get caught up in what about a woman’s look HE finds sexy and will bend heaven and earth to make her conform more to his ideal. All you have to do is look at the hideous lingerie that the dears pick out for us to see this in action–wrong for our coloring, wrong for our body types, wrong in every way except that it’s what the guy thinks about when he wanks.
Excuse me, madam, but fuck your coloring. 