To a certain extent, I couldn’t help but wonder if the treadmill was indeed worth it.
My mum used to be a teacher. When I was a kid, she usually took me to her classes as we couldn’t afford childcare. I followed her from one class to another and immersed myself in the Vietnamese language and literature. The lessons were always so engaging and students were usually, if not always, ready to answer any questions thrown at them. And there was always a certain student in any class who, like clockwork, tried to be the first to answer (correctly) then the class always erupted into sustained applause. Mum always patted them on the back. It felt like the 10-minute standing ovation after the gays watch Nicole Kidman’s AMC commercial.
At one point, I felt like I’d cracked the code: becoming the type of student who would always raise their hand to answer questions. Being someone who would always look for the next big thing and the pat on the back. We do all the things we are told to do to be successful, to gain some control and stability in life, to have a sense of power over our circumstances. But when does it start becoming exhausting?
Particularly for gay men.
Published in February 2022 in the American Sociological Review, a paper lends empirical credence to conclusions about how gender and sexuality shape academic performance. Spoiler alert: gay men achieve stunning success across every level of higher education – for example, compared to straight men, gay men are about 50 percent more likely to have earned an MD, JD or Ph.D., and gay boys’ strikingly high performance is already well established in high school.
Using data from three different national surveys totalling 488,000 adults and one of 17,340 high school students, the researcher Joel Mittleman, a University of Notre Dame sociologist and the paper’s sole author, shows that gay men’s educational advantage is not confined to white gay men. In every single race and ethnic group he could measure, gay men also “surpass straight men by double-digit margins”, he writes in “Intersecting the Academic Gender Gap: The education of lesbian, gay and bisexual America”.
In the words of Jennifer Coolidge: “The gays, they just know how to do stuff”.
That isn’t to say gay men are superior – it demonstrates the conditioned environment to which most gay men grow up and are accustomed. Academic mastery, high performance and success are coping mechanisms that help us navigate the world – the straight man’s world; family and friendship; love, respect and acceptance. Rent is due, water is cut off, bills are unpaid, an eviction notice is taped on the door, and we have one chance to do one thing: we put all of our existence into striving in search of validation. We are not masculine enough to play football (I might just make a generalisation here) or to play video games (another generalisation). When letters, words, and numbers are only gateways we could reach, we’re eager to “ flout gender norms in academics” and to search for success.
And it’s easy to compare ourselves with others. People often talk about how everything is being viewed through the lens of the West, which is often all about individualistic values; I’d argue that’s only half the story. When people try to prove who’s got the most amazing life through Instagram like when all the pop girlies raced to the Billboard Hot 100 in 2012, it suddenly becomes a collectivistic business. I remember when I was growing up, my parents would worry about what our neighbours might think or how I would be compared to other kids in the neighbourhood. Frankly, they still do now. It’s always been a business of others. After all those years of colonisation, the West took everything we could think of, yet those collectivistic values have always remained intact.
But the 21st-century urge to prove yourselves over and over and over again is palpable. The capitalist urge to be successful and get a seat at the table is immense. It feels like a constant treadmill. In March, the New York Times published an article about how millennials are hitting middle age and how everything doesn’t look like what they were promised. The promise of a disaster-proof life if we make the choices – stable careers, perfect marriages, housing investment and so on. The notion of working hard for an adventure and release at last with a sense of safety and calmness feels incorrect these days. Career crises, mass layoffs, education debt, political chaos and climate change are “fraying social fabric, wage pressures and, above all, insecurity”. It’s another day of doing it all over again just to feel secure about what’s next. Yes, therapy does help, though sometimes I do wonder if Western therapy works on Eastern minds.
People usually say gay men walk fast which is obviously another Twitter stereotype (but is it?) Nobody knows why but gay stereotypes always make more noise than a Rita Ora single. Gays love iced coffee? Check. Gays can’t drive? Check. Gays always sing Lady Gaga’s part in Shallow? Check. “Gays walk fast” is no exception. We’ve got business to do. But perhaps deep down we walk fast to flee from the insecurity that we grow up in, to show we’re capable, to be ahead.
My mum calls me every Sunday to ask how I am doing. Sometimes I can feel she’s just collecting information so she can flaunt it at some point to the neighbours. Mum, I’m just having an iced coffee.
