GreekActive

Fraternities and sororities have begun to welcome openly gay members, but Bob Moser discovered that coming out on campus still takes guts.

(Reprinted with permission from Out magazine, September 2002)

Greg Darnell did not set out to be a rebel in preppy’s clothing. Far from it. Four years ago this fall, when he left his rural Kentucky home and headed 18 minutes down the road to Transylvania University, this country boy with a Hollywood smile had one thing on his mind: Blend, baby, blend.

Ever since elementary school, when he started getting the hots for male models in J.C. Penney catalogs, Darnell had known he was “a little bit different.” But being openly gay just wasn’t something you did—not when your father’s people were farmers and your mother’s were big-time Christians: “I had this undeniable fault, I thought, and what could I do about it?”

Hide it, that’s what. And it didn’t take long to figure out the best way to hide at Transylvania, one of the oldest and most tradition-soaked schools in America: Go Greek. Darnell joined the biggest fraternity on campus and fast became the classic Delta Sigma Phi. A semester after he rushed, he moved into Delta Sig’s quarters in Jefferson Davis Hall. He was elected to a fraternity office, got “superinvolved” on campus, and was even voted the sweetheart of a sorority. But lurking under the veneer of social success was perpetual anxiety: “I feared the brothers would turn on me if they knew my secret, that they’d say, ‘You’re a fag? What the hell are you doing in here?’ ”

Darnell had no idea he was living one of the oldest stories in the annals of paranoia. It had been my story when I was the miserably closeted president of Sigma Pi at a conservative school in North Carolina. It was Jamison Keller’s story a decade later when he was Sigma Nu’s miserably closeted Greek Man of the Year at California State University, San Bernardino. It’s been the story of countless thousands of miserably closeted Greeks ever since college fraternities sprang up in the 19th century.

Doug Case, a once-closeted Kappa Sigma who is now coordinator for the Center for Fraternity and Sorority Life at San Diego State University, completed the first serious study of gay and lesbian Greeks in 1996 and found surprisingly high percentages of queer membership. At least 3% to 4% of sorority members were lesbians, and no less than 5% to 6% of fraternity brothers were gay. But while the rest of the world has opened up to gay people in new ways, few sisters or brothers have felt safe enough—or brave enough—to climb out of the Greek closet.

The national offices of fraternities and sororities haven’t exactly helped. It was only five years ago that Sigma Phi Epsilon became the first social fraternity to pass a bylaw  forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexuality. A handful of other frats have followed suit—but not a single national sorority. Because of sororities’ typically more rigid insistence on traditional gender roles, Case says they “won’t even  discuss the issue.” Nancy Evans, an Iowa State University professor and Zeta Gamma Sigma alumna, says progressive women are generally turned off by that throwback mentality. “Fraternities seem a little less focused on image, on having  to look and act a certain way,” she says. “There’s a little more room for difference—a little.”

There are a few Greek societies where “the issue” isn’t an issue at all. But even the largest of these, Delta Lambda Phi, a fraternity for “gay, bisexual, and progressive men,” has spread slowly since its founding in 1986, with only 23 chapters and two colonies nationwide. (In comparison, two of the largest fraternities have over 250 chapters and colonies.) Traditional Greek groups offer the social experience that most aspiring gay Greeks want, says Keller, who now advises fraternities and sororities at California State University, Northridge. But fraternities and sororities are fundamentally conservative, and they won’t become radically open-minded any time soon. “It won’t be anything systemic that makes a difference,” says Keller. “It’s going to have to start one-on-one, one gay brother coming out at a time. And then it’ll build from there.”

It’s already been building. Over the past decade a growing number of intrepid souls—so far, mostly fraternity members—have started to revise the sad, tired plot of the miserably closeted Greek. In their chinos and button-downs, swigging Bloody Marys with the sisters of Chi O, they are a whole new breed of gay rights pioneer. Some have been beaten up or booted out. Some are still struggling to be accepted as “just another brother.” And a small but rapidly multiplying number have done what once seemed unthinkable: They’ve transformed their houses from dens of homophobia into gay-friendly oases, one at a time.

You can read more about gay fraternities in the September issue of Out, on sale in late August.  Check your local bookstore.