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. “And the most vulnerable kids are going to show it first.” “This article is focusing a lens on what we do to all kids,” Lisa Diamond, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, said of the societal pressures that appear to impede lesbians in school even as these stressors possibly unnerve gay males into compensating for homophobia through academic striving. 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. Joel Mittleman, a University of Notre Dame sociologist and the paper’s sole author, found that on an array of academic measures, gay males outperform all other groups on average, across all major racial groups. University of Notre Dame sociologist Joel Mittleman. 20, comes to starkly opposing conclusions about how growing up gay appears to affect the academic performance of males versus females. But the paper, which was published in the American Sociological Review on Feb.