Straight into gay

May 9 -- Can gay men and women become heterosexual? A controversial new study says yes — if they really want to. Critics, though, say the study's subjects may be deluding themselves and that the subject group was scientifically invalid because many of them were referred by anti-gay religious groups. Joseph Nicolosi, a psychologist in Encino, Calif., says he can rid adults, teens, and even children of homosexuality.

can a woman turn a gay man straight

For nearly 30 years, he has offered a "psychodynamic" form of reparative therapy for people — mostly men — seeking to change their sexual orientation. As a queer man in a fraternity, my college career was straight men trying to explain away their queer tendencies as jokes and misunderstandings. (Bombastic Side Eye) A Reddit user recently asked. Most of us assume that these three orientations encompass the universe of sexual identities.

But there is a new kid on the block: The mostly straight male. To the uninitiated, mostly straight. To those who believe that homosexual preference is homosexual orientation, an innate biological predisposition, the answer is a resounding "no." Contrary to this response, the author presents three cases in which the men switch from heterosexual to homosexual relationships (exclusively in two cases) by means of a sexual encounter initiated by an.

I really do. But the paper, which was published in the American Sociological Review on Feb. 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. 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.

Today, women comprise 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.

The three surveys of American adults consistently indicated that gay men are far more likely than straight men to have graduated from high school or college, with just over half of gay men having earned a college degree, compared with about 35 percent of straight men. Some 6 percent of gay men have a Ph. The longitudinal survey showed that compared with their straight male peers, gay males earned higher GPAs in high school and college, enrolled in harder classes, took school more seriously, had more academically minded friends and had a much lower rate of ever dropping out for a month or more.

In stark contrast, these performance disparities were largely reversed when comparing lesbians with straight girls. Most strikingly, 26 percent of lesbians reported at least one dropout period, compared with 15 percent of heterosexual females. The U. Historically, girls have received better grades than boys. But during much of the 20th century, societal constraints — including the predominant expectation that young women would become wives and mothers and not pursue careers — suppressed their graduation rates.

In theory, this left lesbians with an advantage. Searching for the drivers of these differences in school performance between straight and gay students, Mittleman used a machine-learning algorithm to identify response patterns to survey questions that predicted being male versus female among members of the longitudinal cohort. This suggested that not just sexual orientation, but its intersection with gender affectation could have influenced how well the gay and lesbians students did in school.

Seeking to explain the sociocultural dynamics possibly at play in these complex equations, Mittleman pointed in his paper to the feminine archetype, long a prized ideal in white, middle-American culture, of the demurely diligent student. Think Nancy Drew. Characterizing masculinity as a fragile and insecure state, Mittleman argued that the long-standing anti-intellectual bias that plagues many American boys is driven in large part by their urge to assert their masculinity by differentiating themselves from the good-girl archetype.

Gay boys, however, appear willing — even eager — to flout gender norms in academics. On the flip side, young lesbians may be disinclined to identify with the femininity intrinsic to the good-student ideal, Mittleman suggested. This could hold especially true for Black girls, whom white authority figures already tend to stereotype as masculine, according to previous research.

This refers to the title of the memoir by former Democratic National Committee treasurer Andrew Tobias, in which he chronicled his youthful crusade to appease his internalized homophobia through admission to Harvard University and other feats of superlative achievement. In a paper published in Basic and Applied Social Psychology, psychologist Mark Hatzenbuehler , now of Harvard University, and Pachankis found evidence suggesting that gay male college students indeed sought to compensate for anti-gay stigma by deriving their self-worth in part through academic mastery and other forms of competition.

From a young age I was determined to become a doctor so I could prove to everyone that I could be successful even though I was gay. Chris remishofsky. To me, that is still a major question — how does that work? Brian Mustanski , a professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University, cautioned that the relative success of gay men could amount to a double-edged sword.

Suggesting that feverish academic striving in search of validation can come at a steep cost to mental and physical health, Mustanski pointed to his own research findings that gay men have disproportionately high levels of chronic inflammation.