What We Talk About When We Talk About Diversity

A few years ago, I attended a professional graduate school at a good university.  Recently, an acquaintance asked me how diverse my 200-person class was.

“Hmmm…  I think I was literally the only lesbian,” I said.  

“But there were lots of LGBT people, right?” my acquaintance asked.  And then she named seven or eight gay men who had, indeed, been in my class.  

In the moment, I murmured something like, “Oh, yeah that’s right.”  But internally, I raised an eyebrow.  Not only were these all men, but they were gender-conforming men, men who went to fancy prep schools, men who use “summer” as a verb and net annual salaries I could live off for a decade.

But in my acquaintance’s mind, we were all people who slept with people of the same sex; we all checked the LGBT box.  We were all undeniably, certifiably, and irrevocably queer.  So why did I blanch being lumped in with these gentlemen?  (BTW, I know a few of them personally, and they truly are great guys.)

I think it’s because the things that made me feel alienated in graduate school did not have much to do with my attraction to women.  In the upper echelons of this particular profession, no one cares who I carouse with or wake up beside.  The things that made me feel alienated were, in order of their significance:
(1) social class
(2) gender nonconformity
(3) persistent lack of interest in making lots of money

The Nice Gay Men (NGM) of whom my acquaintance spoke shared none of these traits.  Yet these are the traits that made me different from my peers, that let me bring a distinct perspective to the classroom, and that will continue to shape my voice in the future. But to the admissions committee, we all looked similar: white homosexuals with good grades from well-regarded undergraduate institutions.  

(Obviously, lots of other kinds of diversity are important: race, disability, religion, ethnicity, and others.  I’m just focusing on one kind here, which isn’t intended to negate the importance of these other kinds, nor of the intersections of these other kinds of diversity with queerness.)

I’m not suggesting that the NGM’s experience of LGBT life is somehow less “valid” than my own, nor that I embody “diversity” in a way that the NGM do not.  But there was something ironic about being categorized with them, since they embodied precisely the traits that seemed so apparently lacking in me: wealth, gender conformity, a lucrative career path.

I bring all of this up mostly to ask the following: when we say that we are striving for diversity, what is it we’re really striving for?  People whose experiences somehow bring different “perspectives?”  Maybe.  But how do we measure that on a form?  Do we want people who were statistically unlikely to end up in the application pool?  Do we prize phenotypical diversity?  Do we simply want the folks with the highest grades and test scores?  And in achieving any of these types of diversity, what role should (and does) queerness play?