Part of it has to do with an inferiority complex. I think gay men tend to be high achievers because we feel that we're lacking and need to make up for it in some way. The whole fetishization fits into that.
I think that makes sense. It does feel like gays often strive for perfection to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth or chronic feelings of shame. Having a Perfect Gay Family©—two husbands with a perfect sixpack, house with the picket fence, dog, 1.5 pseudobiological children—is a kind of
reductio ad absurdum argument for being a worthwhile human while also being gay. It's too much of a performance. Often, we're told that the shame and low self-esteem which drives this perfectionism originate from societal homophobia. It makes sense in this view that overcoming internalized and societal homophobia leads to less shame and more self-esteem and a consequent reduction in perfectionist behavior. Gays who have gone done a kind of inner work, it could be argued, will be freer to
choose what kind of life they want to live without the pressure of so much of a reaction formation to homophobia and shame. They may end up choosing to do the same thing, or something only slightly different, but it will be coming from a more authentic place rather than 'keeping up appearances'.
This leads me to ask what type of Narrative should gay men create? How can we create a fourth way? We sorta of did that in the 1900s and somewhat in the 1970s.
The process of inner work I've described above might result in gays who are more free to come up with what you call a 'Fourth Way' of being - one which comes from an authentic expression of self. Probably, if we imagine that gays are a pretty diverse population, this will look different to different people depending on factors like personality, culture, sociosexuality. So perhaps the Fourth Way is not one-size-fits-all but, instead, just giving people the stable, healthy psychological terrain upon which to build what they feel is an authentic life.
But I'd hate to end on such an optimistic and positive note. Another, related, view of gay being high achievers is not so popular. Let's assume that homosexuality is a kind of narcissistic inversion (following Freud et seq., but not strictly). In that view, gays' tendency to perfectionism is not so much the result of external factors (e.g. homophobia) but instead
inherent to the condition of being a fag. The shame, for which the perfectionism compensates, is also inherent - by this I don't mean that you're born with it but only that it's such a deep personality structure that it's practically immutable. It is this narcissistic personality structure which underlies a raft of behaviors including homosexuality, perfectionism, superficiality, depressive episodes, etc.
Rubinstein (
J. Sex Marital Ther. 2010;36(1):24-34;
SciHub) found that "homosexual students score higher in both measures of narcissism and lower on the self-esteem measure, compared to their heterosexual counterparts", though this study has been roundly criticized by e.g. Drescher (
J. Sex Marital Ther. 2010;36(1):38-47;
SciHub) for, notably, its "pedestrian" understanding of psychoanalytic theories of narcissism. I think lots of Drescher's criticism applies but the study is nevertheless interesting. Rubistein puts forward a few interpretations for his findings, which fit neatly with our discussion here: (1) "homosexuals who are dominated by the pursuit of pleasure have impaired frustration tolerance, and poor self-esteem regulation would be considered narcissistic" (the argument for this in the paper is not clear but I read what he's saying as supporting a view that homosexuality is a manifestation of narcissism) (2) gay men "develop narcissistic traits of personality in response to the oppressive homophobic power of the heterosexual society" (hence the Perfect Gay Family©); (3) gay narcissism is adaptive because "the visual demands and standards within the gay community force gay men to take care of their appearance to an extent that may augment, nurture, and even induce narcissism" (which, actually, I think is a bit of a circular argument - if the culture is narcissistic, aren't the individuals who co-construct that culture
also narcissistic?). The point of this digression is to say that I don't think it's as simple as gay high-achievers
reacting to societal homophobia; there's certainly more at play for each individual and, perhaps, there is a relationship between narcissistic personality traits and homosexuality which can also explain why homosexuals tend toward grandiosity and superficiality. I have a lot of takes on homosexuality and narcissism but my autism has already got the better of me so I'll hold myself back, for now.