Gay men populate the fields of teaching, construction, medicine, real estate, and a whole host of other occupations along with the rest of the LGBT community and the straight community. But they tend to dominate other fields, like interior design.

Or do they?

With Labor Day approaching, it’s a fitting time to look into what many gay men appear to consider a labor of love.

Mild Guess

“I don’t know how you quantify that there are more gay designers than not,” says Taylor Yarbrough, an openly gay Atlanta interior designer and owner of G. Taylor Design + Consulting.

Regardless, Yarbrough estimated a figure, saying that in his experience, the field has been “something like 2/3 women and 1/3 men, and of those men it was about 50/50 gay vs. straight.”

Of course he pointed out that these are estimates with no scientific basis behind them, besides good old-fashioned gaydar of course. But that 50/50 figure is much higher than most estimates of the percentage of gay people in the general population, which usually varies between 10 and 20 percent.

If you look into subgroups of the design world however, like residential vs. commercial, many in the field find a different result: higher percentages of straight men in commercial design. “The distinction there is accreditation versus non-accreditation,” says Yarbrough. “For instance, if you go to the Atlanta Decorative Arts Center, it’s predominantly gay. 80% of the work that comes out of there is residential.”

Design Star

Vern Yip, Nate Berkus, Thom Filicia. Openly gay celebrity interior designers and decorators are scattered across the media landscape.

David Bromstad is one of them. The host of HGTV’s “Color Splash: Miami” gave his take on the topic to Fenuxe. “Most of the interior design guys that I’ve met are gay and if they’re straight, they look and act gay!,” he says.

Bromstad wavered however on whether gay men have a creative gene that leads them towards these professions. “There’s a lot of gay people that don’t have that gene but the ones that do really own it and really want to do what makes them happy on a daily basis,” he says.

The Next Shift

Regardless of the presence of a creative gene or not, some just knew early on what they liked to do. Yarbrough says his choice in profession had little to do with the field being more welcoming to gay men.

“It was innate in my character,” he says. “I don’t know if it had anything to do with me being gay or not.”

We will probably never know for certain. What we do know is gay men populate the field of interior design, possibly to a large extent.

With the passage of time and the fading away of prejudices, the stereotypes about certain jobs only being fit for certain groups of people will fade as well. Look at nursing, a field in which men previously got involved in only while on the battlefield. In the last 30 years however, male nurses are a common sight thanks to a shortage of nurses, better pay, and changing societal attitudes.

And as those tides continue to shift across the entire workforce, our labors of love can all be celebrated without questions about why we love them in the first place.