The earliest studies on the exploration of a relationship between sexual orientation and creativity were focused on treating sexual minority as a pathological condition and often placed individuals in unseemly categories. For instance, one of the earliest research on this topic was conducted by Ellis (1959) who compared a group of homosexual ‘patients’ in psychotherapy with a group of heterosexual psychotherapy patients. According to the author, in his study while heterosexual patients were ‘exceptionally
heterosexual’ based on their past sexual experiences, homosexual individuals had ‘severe
homosexual problems’. Homosexual individuals were classified based on their past experiences as (i) bisexuals (sexual encounters with individuals of the same and opposite sex), (ii) fixed homosexuals (homosexuals who maintained their own ‘sexual role’) or (iii) inverts (homosexuals who maintained a ‘sex role inversion’). Criteria for rating the creativity of each individual were ideational fluency, flexibility, novelty, sensitivity to problems, synthesizing ability and analysing ability. Ellis reported significantly higher creativity ratings for heterosexual individuals when compared to homosexual individuals.
His study was later criticised on a number of serious issues pertaining to the facts that (a) his participant group comprised of patients in therapy, (b) creativity scores were determined by dictionary definitions and (c) that he himself was the experimenter, the rater as well as the therapist (Domino, 1977). In a similar study, no significant differences were found between the creativity of homosexuals and that of heterosexuals (Deluca, 1966) as measured by the Klopfer’s scheme for evaluating creative potentials. Although this study used unwarranted subgroups of individuals based on their past sexual roles, it managed to highlight the issue of the common practice of referring to homosexuality as a pathological condition at that time as well as presented contradictory results.
Until 1973, Homosexuality was categorised as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association (1968). With the sixth printing of DSM-II in 1974, homosexuality was finally removed from this list (American Psychiatric Association, 1973). This saw a positive change in the outlook of researchers working on investigating the psychology of sexual minority. For example, Domino published a study for which participants were recruited from various organisations promoting and defending the rights of homosexuals, social centres for homosexual activities, occupations involving creative endeavours and college counselling centres (Domino, 1977). Each individual’s self-reported sexual orientation was accepted at its face value. This study reported results similar to those reported by earlier studies; there were no significant differences in the scores obtained by homosexual individuals on various creativity measures as compared to the heterosexual control group. Creativity was measured using nine measures of various dimensions of creativity (which included the Remote Associates Task, Adjective check List, Barron-Welsh Revised Art Scale, Alternate Uses Task, Consequences Task, Associational Fluency, Franck Drawing Completion Test, Holtzman Inkblot test and Openness to Experience Inquiry). This study provided a clear indication of a lack of evidence in support of the hypotheses that non-
heterosexuals are more creative than heterosexuals. However, Domino himself was wary of the validity of the measures of creativity that were being used at that time. A recent online study also reported no significant differences in the creativity scores of homosexual males as compared to heterosexual males (Noor, Chee, & Ahmad, 2013). Although, this study lacked the general rigor of a systematic investigation of creativity in sexual minority (extremely small sample size, limited validity of the measures of creativity used etc.), it contributed to the evidence pointing towards no difference in the creativity of heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals.
There seems to be a general lack of substantial literature on the investigation of creativity in sexual minority groups. Demb, in her review on gay men in the arts (Demb, 1992) invited researchers to investigate the incidence of gay men in the arts, while outlining the reasons why there seems to be a lack of literature on the topic. She highlighted that stigmatization of both homosexuals and the researchers who study them as well as homophobia interfere with such undertakings. Despite these concerns, a few studies exist which aimed to systematically investigate the relationship using large survey based samples. Lewis & Seaman (2004) used data from the General Social Survey collected in the USA (in 1993 and 1998) from 180 Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual (LGB) individuals and from 1938 heterosexual individuals. The authors found that a significantly higher number of LGB individuals had visited galleries or art museums, attended a classical music or opera performance and gone to dance performances when compared to heterosexuals. In conjunction to consuming arts, LGB individuals were significantly more likely to have played a musical instrument and to have taken part in a live performance than straight respondents. Finally, LGB individuals were more educated, twice as likely to live in cities, less likely to be married, have children and had lower household incomes. These results indicate that LGB individuals are more likely to consume and produce art. There is a clear disconnect between findings from the survey
based studies which report a positive link and findings from the studies exploring the psychology of creativity in LGB individuals which report the absence of a relationship.
A possible explanation for this disconnect could be glanced through a study conducted by Konik & Crawford (2004). The authors examined the relationship between cognitive flexibility (as a measure of creativity) and sexual orientation and hypothesized that bisexuals possess higher levels of cognitive flexibility. This hypothesis was driven by Zinik’s ‘flexibility model of bisexuality’ which proposed that since bisexuals traverse between the heterosexual and homosexual communities, they possess higher cognitive flexibility (Zinik, 1985). Konik and Crawford also referred to Carter (1985) who suggested that “androgynous individuals may demonstrate more cognitive flexibility because their personalities incorporate both traditionally feminine and masculine traits”. These speculations motivated them to parcellate sexual orientation in three categories instead of two (Lesbian/gay/homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual/other). Their findings revealed that individuals with a non-exclusive sexual identity (i.e. bisexual/biaffectionate) scored significantly higher on the Cognitive Flexibility Scale when compared to heterosexuals or homosexuals. These results indicated a need to isolate bisexuality and treat it as a separate group in investigations of sexual orientation. As Charyton pointed out in her review on the relationship between sexual orientation and creativity (Charyton, 2007), it appears that bisexuality may have a higher empirical relationship with creativity. She invited researchers to address the question – “Is there a relationship between bisexuality and creativity?”. In order to bridge this gap in the current understanding of the effect of sexual minority on the measures of creativity, the present research aimed to investigate the role of bisexuality and homosexuality in creativity. This was approached using a wide array of measures of creativity and sophisticated assessments of sexual orientation. I hypothesised that bisexuals would score significantly higher than heterosexuals and homosexuals on various measures of creativity. Mosing et
al (Mosing, Verweij, Abé, de Manzano, & Ullén, 2016) provided another possible explanation for a failure to find support for the ‘homosexual creativity’. Using an adapted domain specific creative achievement questionnaire (with 7 domains such as the visual arts, creative writing, music etc.), they found that LGB’s show high creative engagement only in specific domains (theatre and writing) and not the others. This consequently guided the present research to understand and explore creativity as a multi-domain, multi- dimensional trait.