To members of the Greek community, there is nothing more important than representing your letters well. It’s hard to explain the feeling of the moment when you put those letters on for the first time and finally get to display to the world that you are a full-fledged member of that organization. Wearing them shows you are proud to be a part of that group and have no shame in sharing that information with anyone who happens to pass you by. For the past few years, I have been happy to wear my letters and broadcast that I was a member of my fraternity, but there is another group which I belong to that I have never before felt comfortable in publically sharing the letters for.
Over the past year and a half, I’ve tried writing this article several times and an equal number of times have held down the backspace key and watched the words slowly disappear. I’ve tried writing it in several styles, only to have each stylistic change ending up a blank page once again. I’ve spent countless nights in bed lying awake, trying to figure out the perfect way to get these words out. However, I’ve figured out there is no perfect way to spell this out and all these hesitations were just part of me postponing an article that I knew, deep down, I wouldn’t be happy until I wrote. So I figured the best way for me to write this would be to be a straightforward and simple as possible.
So here it goes: long before I donned the letters of Greek life, I had already applied another set to my life, the letters LGBT.
I’m not sure why now is the time that I’ve decided to reveal this part of my life, I’m really trying not to over think it or I fear I’ll lose my nerve, but I definitely didn’t want to leave this school before getting the chance to share what this experience has been like. Part of it is as a closeted LGBT fraternity member, I know that reading articles like this can be incredibly comforting, because you can finally see that there are others out there who have gone or are going through a similar situation.
When I first decided to join a fraternity, I knew it would be difficult. I knew I would encounter people from all walks of life with different upbringings and backgrounds. I knew I would encounter people who would be fundamentally against me just because of who I am and back then, I wasn’t ready to face that battle. I wanted to be a part of a fraternity, and I foolishly thought that I had to hide a major part of who I am to be a part of one.
However, it’s not as if I hid this part of my life for no reason. I have heard people attack the LGBT community and its supporters while in Greek life on several occasions and for a while, I let those voices dictate my life. Even though I now realize those were the voices of the few and not the majority, each snide remark drove me farther and farther from ever revealing what was my biggest secret.
Explaining what it has been like to live with this secret is somewhat difficult. It’s literally like living with a weight on your chest or having an ever-lingering, annoying thought in the back of your mind at all times. Basically, you feel like you can’t ever totally let your guard down or relax for fear of what might happen.
It also affects the way you interact and socialize with others. For example, I never let people use my phone because I thought they might see an incriminating text not meant for them. I never talked about dating because I didn’t want to bring attention to the fact that I wasn’t dating anyone. I monitored my drinking to the best of my ability to prevent myself from drinking too much and letting something slip. On nights where I did, the fear upon waking up the next morning and not knowing what I said or did was unexplainable; it would literally take days for me to begin to relax again and be reassured that nothing came out. It’s a task that takes constant vigilance which, quite frankly, has been exhausting and pointless. The paranoia, the lying and the sneaking around all add up until it’s simply too much to handle.
The thing is, I have never really questioned who I am. I have known that I am a member of the LGBT community for quite some time and I’ve never personally felt like there was anything wrong with that. Yet, I was and still am afraid to come clean for so many reasons; I was scared of being defined by that one characteristic by every new person I met, I was scared of being dubbed a stereotype regardless of my actual personality and, as most young people are, I was scared of being judged.
So, as Ellen Page so accurately put it in a recent speech, I “lied by omission”. I still made it clear that I supported the LGBT cause, but I never made it clear that those were causes that directly affected my life. I never openly discussed my sexuality and just told people I liked to keep my dating life private. My life was full of excuses and a constant fear that someone would see through them.
It’s something I see in some of the other people in Greek life who are also members of the LGBT community. They are full of fear, paranoia and excuses as to who they really are. One could probably count the number of openly LGBT Greek life students at this school on a single hand, yet there are definitely more out there; they are just afraid to be open about who they are. Those people are why I felt the need to write this article.
There are so few LGBT voices in the Greek Life community and that makes it easy for people to feel isolated and alone; I have felt the same way several times during my time here. I felt like I had no one to talk to, that no one understood what I was going through and that I had to hide this certain part of me to be accepted. It’s not as if I don’t have an incredibly supportive group of friends and family, but still, I felt that I was the only one wearing the LGBT letters in addition to my Greek ones.
I’m not saying it’s an easy process to come to terms with figuring out who you are; coming to this realization is something that has taken a lot of soul-searching and time. But once you have accepted yourself, you have to trust that you have joined a house that will support you. It’s not to say that one hundred percent of people will understand, but the same could be said of any situation: universal popularity is not a real thing. But you have to believe that you have surrounded yourself with friends who will not judge you for simply being yourself.
It has taken me a long time to finally have the guts to write this entire article and even now, I am scared to hit the publish button and send it out for the entire internet to see. It’s going to change a lot about my life, which is something that is both exciting and terrifying. But I feel like the time has finally come. I’ve been proudly wearing my fraternity letters for years and now, I think I’m finally ready to give the LGBT ones the attention they deserve.