Once considered unfit for the classroom, studies geared toward understanding homosexuality are slowly becoming commonplace in colleges across the country, and students -- gay, straight or otherwise -- are paying close attention.
Michele DiPietro, who has a doctorate degree in statistics and is the director of the Eberly Center at Carnegie Mellon University, created a class centered on investigating statistics about gay culture. According to DiPietro, these studies included biologist Alfred Kinsey's controversial estimate that 10 percent of the population is gay.
"As a gay man, I already had a lot of knowledge [of studies] that were being done in the U.S. on gays," DiPietro said. "So, I tried to come up with a class on that. I was inspired to kind of take my own challenge and make my own classes as diverse as possible."
DiPietro said statistics are not just "abstract things" because they can be applied to understand human concepts.
"It can tell us more things about societal issues," he said.
DiPietro said students who identify themselves as gay, straight and bisexual take his course, which also includes the study of bisexual and transgender people as well as those who question their sexuality. Students taking the class have gained confidence to accept their sexuality, he said.
"There was one guy who started the class as SQJD [what he called straight, questioning himself for Johnny Depp], and by the end of the class, he had come out as bisexual," DiPietro said. "He said that when he was coming out, the content helped him because he always thought, 'I'm not totally gay.'"
Social sciences major Ellen Parkhurst, the only openly lesbian student in DiPietro's class, said in an email that many of her classmates became more open-minded by taking the course.
"The statistics [were] very interesting, because I was able to read academic papers regarding the topic of homosexuality," Parkhurst said. "I enjoyed learning about the potential causes of homosexuality that people have studied."
Parkhurst said she supports classes on gender and diversity on college campuses.
"Because there are gay people, black people, Jewish people, disabled people, etc., there needs to be a way for students to learn about these populations so they can gauge how they will respond when they meet someone of a different background," she said.
Jacob Wilcock, an assistant for DiPietro's class who is gay, said taking the class helped him understand the depth and history of gay culture issues, such as gays in the military, gays' relation with religion and gay marriage - issues that have been around long before he was born.
"I thought all of those issues were five years old when I took the class," he said. "As a gay man, that realization not only changed my opinion of these political situations, but it radically also made me feel like part of something greater."
Though he said it is "absolutely critical that universities offer classes of this nature," Wilcock said the class is based more on students' statistical analysis of research and studies rather than gay issues.
"Like all of my classes here, being gay and out is something you never really think about. Nobody cared," he said. "You have to remember that, ultimately, this is a statistics class and not a queer-studies class."
Harvard University professor Claudia Casteñeda, who teaches Science, Gender and Sexuality, said her course work stems from sex-related readings that focus on feminist and gay literature that attempt to "question the power of science to define what is normal and what is pathological."
"We examine the ways in which science has established truths about the nature of bodies and divided these bodies into categories such as male/female, heterosexual/homosexual and so on," Casteñeda said in an email.
While other schools have also started branching out to adopt alternative sexuality studies, Boston University students will not find any such classes available.
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