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This Reddit thread that I saw linked over on rDrama made me wonder if any studies have ever been done about the relative intelligence of straight people and gay people.
Just like there is reason to believe that some ethnic groups are more intelligent than others on average, is it possible that some sexual orientations are more intelligent than others on average? I have not tried to crunch the numbers, but it seems to me that gay people are overrepresented compared to their population size among the ranks of prominent intellectuals and artists. Not just recently, but also hundreds of years ago. Them living in high cost of living areas would add evidence to this theory.
Of course there are many possible other explanations, and the thread mentions some of them: gays have more money because they usually have no kids, gays in poor areas stay closeted out of fear of persecution and are drawn to liberal and usually also expensive cities, gays move in to poor areas and make them fashionable and then those areas become rich. Etc.
One other possible explanation that comes to my mind that I did not see in the thread is that maybe because it is easier for gay men to get laid than straight men on average, they don't have to devote as much of their minds as straights to getting laid and are thus free to focus on other things. I'm not sure about that theory, though - after all, just because getting laid is easy for you does not necessarily mean that you will spend less of your mental energy thinking about getting laid. And being a sexual minority could tend to add some level of stress that partly counterbalances the benefits of being able to easily get laid, especially in the olden days.
I suppose it is also possible that intelligent, creative gays are more likely to come out than intellectually mediocre gays, but I have no idea if there is any truth to that.
I do wonder, though, if maybe part of the reason for gay affluence and prominence is an actual intelligence difference of some sort.
I suspect there's some kind of "survivorship bias" effect, wherein less intelligent gay men will make stupid decisions early on which select them out of the sample, making the remaining pool smarter by default. This is true of people in general, but given what a small proportion of the population gay men are and how risky their lifestyles tend to be compared to the general population, even a small number of deaths in the community can radically shift the average intelligence.
Imagine a rural town with a population of 10,000 adults, made up of 4,900 straight men, 4,900 straight women, 100 gay men and 100 lesbians (no bisexuals). Every cohort has an average IQ of 100 with a standard deviation of 15 points.
Every year, 2% of straight men do something stupid which gets them killed (driving drunk, playing with a gun, OD'ing, getting into a stupid fistfight outside a bar), and these deaths are concentrated in the bottom half of the IQ distribution. Every year, a higher percentage (say, 10%) of gay men do something stupid which gets them killed, likewise concentrated in the bottom half of the IQ distribution. Why is the percentage of deaths among gay men higher? Because in addition to all of the stupid things which kill straight men, there are additional risky activities likely to lead to death which gay men disproportionately practise (but straight men generally don't). These include contracting one or more STDs from unprotected sex with a promiscuous partner, prostituting themselves carelessly and getting murdered by a john, or indeed (depending on how homophobic our hypothetical rural town is) lacking the situational awareness not to be flamboyantly gay in an environment where doing so might get you beaten up (when a more intelligent gay man might have the cop-on to dial down the camp in a bar where Bud Light is pointedly not on tap, or while walking past the local mosque).
At the end of the year, from a starting population of 4,900 straight men, there are 4,802 left. If we take the values in the bottom half of the distribution and remove 98 values at random, that brings the average intelligence up, but because the sample size is so large it's a very minor shift: from a starting position of 100.24 to an end position of 100.62. In the gay male population, subtracting 10 random values in the bottom half of the distribution brings our average IQ up a whole 2 points (100.22 to 102.26). This is more than five times the survivorship effect as in the straight male community (which is exactly what we'd expect if gay men's lifestyles are five times as risky as the average straight man's).
Meanwhile, the straight women are charging they phone and eating hot chip, and the lesbians are doing crochet, writing angsty poetry and giving their girlfriends the silent treatment. There's a very minor selection effect as a small proportion of stupid women might get killed by driving drunk or carelessly prostituting themselves - but even the stupidest woman is far more risk-averse than the stupidest straight man, and the survivorship effect is far less pronounced (maybe the average shifts up by 0.19 points or less every year).
Do this cumulatively over several years and you can imagine how stratified the relative intelligences might end up. A gay man smart/lucky enough to survive into his thirties would want to be fastidiously perfectionist (dare I say, anal) about using condoms: he's probably seen far more than his fair share of his peers cut down in their prime than a straight man of the same age.
If this was happening it would show up in the stats as drastically lower life expectancies for gay men.
Courtesy of @naraburns: https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/30/6/1499/651821:
If gay men now seem disproportionately intelligent, it could be an artifact of a couple of generations of the least intelligent gay men being purged by HIV. As deaths from HIV (and, to a lesser extent, male prostitutes being murdered) fall further, we might expect the disparity to normalise.
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Is that not something they actually have? Given the generally poor state of LGBT health I’d be shocked if it wasn’t.
Probably not, at least since AIDS was controlled.
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