I was a young, closeted fourteen-year-old boy, learning to tie a tie for the first time on the way to his new life at a private, all-boys boarding school, Trinity-Pawling. I had, what many could classify as, low expectations.

To the fairness of my ever-caring parents who, with my recent vehement criticism of Trinity-Pawling School, rush to remind me that I was positively overjoyed to attend the institution (oh, how history rewrites itself), many of my worries at the time were internal. As a confused, rotund homosexual and emerging troublemaker, I had not yet fully grasped the ability to voice many of my opinions or concerns. And so, without protest (perhaps a first), I marched into the unknown, armed only with a blazer, slacks, and deeply engrained self-hate.

When you sign up to attend my high school, you agree to more than a code of conduct. You join a collectivist mass, a community of students who are as united as they are divided and despising of each other. You become a member of, as we, or they, would call it, "the brotherhood."

Those words leave a sour film in my mouth when I speak them now, like spoiled yogurt. They remind me of six-day workweeks, suicidal urges, and around-the-clock microaggressions. Most of all, the concept of the "brotherhood" perfectly exemplifies the hypocritical guts of this institution, and the hate and violence it vicariously promotes.

Trinity-Pawling was a single-sex preparatory school for young boys. Its mission statement is as follows:

To educate and instill a value system that prepares young men to be contributing members of society amidst the challenges of an ever-changing world.

However, as I attended the school, and as I look back on it as a sophomore in college, it seems the "challenge" that T-P is preparing us young boys for is the very fact that the world is changing. It doesn't discipline its students into preparation for the current world, its break them down and rebuilds them as ill-fitting, shattered memories of the old world. The fact that any modern institution can claim to prepare its students for the real world while submerging them in the complete absence of female counterparts is laughable and disgraceful. Let's talk about that absence for a second.

I have been told the same line of reasoning for my high school's system of single-sex education before I even arrived on campus, and it continues post-graduation. As an institution that strives to properly educate or condition its students, T-P needs to do so without disturbance, and that's exactly what girls are: a disturbance. The school has never even attempted to make an argument for it's no girls allowed policy based on statistics, which I assume is because there are none since every study ever done on single-sex education has returned with the same result: it doesn't work. So, instead, girls become a distraction in the eyes of the institution. The female student is not an equal counterpart to the male, she is a hindrance; her education is a detriment to others, and so she is barred from attending. This argument is similar, alarmingly so, to the proponents of segregation in the 1960s, who argued, without fact, that desegregating schools would create a burden on the white students. Many white voters bought this argument, just like the parents and trustees of my Alma Mater.

While some may view this argument as only minorly problematic, its rhetoric has hugely damaging and immeasurable effects on the school's student body and, by association, American society as a whole. By endorsing this reasoning, the school by proxy endorses the prioritizing of male citizens over female citizens. We see this in societal discussions of sexual violence, abortion, and equal pay, and while I don't suggest my school is a fountainhead of institutional sexism, to deny its role in its perpetuation would be criminal. Some would defend the school by saying the discrimination based upon gender is valid, given the existence of all-girl schools where female students are free to attend. You could easily summarize this argument with a catchy little phrase: separate but equal.

And so a special, horrifying phenomenon arises, what I have come to call "isolation in masculinity." In its absence of women, its glorification of athleticism, and enforcement of traditional sexual and gender roles, Trinity-Pawling disciplines its students into a very specific box: heterosexual, cisgender men. These same men are disciplined in an environment that justifies its exclusion of women through sexist objectification and dismissal. Without exposure to female counterparts, and I don't mean girls at a dance, I mean women you sit and learn with as equals, students are morphed into the image of the hypermasculine, a model that survives upon the pillars of misogyny, homophobia, and classism.

Its exclusion of women additionally results in an estrangement of its gay students. Typically, gay men will connect with female students, since they share sexual interests and because there is a general societal exclusion of gay men from hypermasculinized spaces. As a space that supported traditional family values through its addressing of the student body as collectively heterosexual, meaning at zero points in my career did the institution even play with the idea that its student body could contain queer people, female friends become more than an escape from the brutality of the overly masculine: they become an essential of survival. As a queer student in these particular places, being openly gay is more than a social inconvenience, it's a threat to your safety. You never know who will be comfortable, who will be uncomfortable, or who will be violent. Coming out to my friends at Trinity-Pawling was a game of Russian roulette from which there was no escape: only chance could decide which friends you kept, which friends you lost, and which friends tried to kill you. In this situation, female friends might be the only release from the constant daily agony of your silent oppression. For some time, the only female friends I had were remnants from middle school, girls who, as time went on, became more like developing strangers than actual friends. And so I bit my tongue. A weak facade of heterosexuality wasn't too hefty of a price, was it? Die another day, I guess.

I remember speaking with members of the admissions department about the issue of queer representation in the student body. The individuals I spoke with, whom I respect immensely, said that T-P does nothing to discriminate against gay applicants. However, the school simultaneously has no quotas or diversity programs that include gay students, so there are no actual initiatives supporting the admittance of gay freshman. This means that queer representation completely depends on the interest of gay applicants, of which there is little. After all, what level-headed gay 8th grader would be enthusiastic about attending a school where your female friends are a "distraction" and the headmaster addresses a room of 300 kids as if he had hard evidence that they were all straight? And so the erasure continues. The school remains a space where gay students live in the shadows of hypermasculinity, crying on the phone to their mom in private and throwing out sexist comments for the sake of conformity.

But let's not ignore the intersectionality of the situation. By excluding female students and defining male existence beneath the umbrella of the hetero, Trinity-Pawling takes a strict gender conformist stance. As an all-boys school, where do trans people fit into this equation? Or, for that matter, gender neutral people? Trans women would be surely excluded from the school since their gender preference means they cannot comfortably abide by the dress code (not to suggest that queer comfort is a priority here). Trans men certainly can't attend either. Though they may appear in the chapel promptly each morning in suit and tie, their anatomy makes them a clear target of sexual violence within the student body, and their safety would be under constant threat. Gender neutral people, given that they possess a male anatomy, could potentially attend the school to their own displeasure, but they would be forced into traditional gender norms and strictly labeled, with the rest of their brotherhood, as a boy.

So let's review: this brotherhood, of which I gained exclusive access in the fall of 2012, is one that assimilates students of varying backgrounds and experiences into a common stew, one that, despite falling under quite specific labels and restrictions, melts down students all the same into its drowning contents. But surely something must be gained from this assimilation? A bond of sorts? These are my brothers after all.

This is where my stomach turns the most. The student body of Trinity-Pawling generally accepts that the school has problems in multiple areas, while very neatly ice skating around the deep seeded systemic issues that rot out the institution from the inside, applauding meaningless improvements in the name of "incremental progress." Most critics would agree that, despite its flaws, it's a place that you will remember and cherish for the rest of your days. You have formed an inseparable bond with your fellow brothers, one that can't be broken.

Give me a fucking break.

Last year, a student I graduated with, a fellow brother who I will leave unnamed out of respect for his family, took his own life. We were not close friends, in fact, we barely spoke in day to day school life, but he was always a kind and caring individual. His death shook many of my friends and I. We had only graduated months ago, only recently formed that bond that will stay with us for our lives, and one of us had already died. As a suicide, this event at away at my mind. If we were really the brotherhood we said we were, where boys can lean on each other and provide for each other, would this really have happened? If we were really the brotherhood we said we were, would this kid still be alive?

Out of respect, I drove back out to New York to attend his funeral. I sat in the chapel, surrounded by wailing mourners, with no more than ten of my former classmates. We were a class of a hundred students. Now, we were only a few months into the first year of college, so I understood that many of my classmates were too busy to attend. There had been an outpouring of support for our fellow brothers online after his death, including the creation of a Facebook group where students who used to talk shit behind my back posted about the need to support one another.

The morning after his funeral, I opened my Snapchat and watched a series of videos that showed students from my graduating class on campus, visiting friends and catching up on old times. Not one of these students had attended the funeral only a few miles away. They had come to Pawling for a football game and promptly left the next morning while their classmate's ashes were buried across town.

I got in my car, started the drive back to Connecticut, and cried the hardest I had since graduating. This brotherhood, this family that I suffered and labored to become a part of, was a fucking lie. I'm not sure what I expected. I don't know why after the empty rhetoric spewed daily by the administrators, I don't know why after witnessing the drift of my siblings and their friends of the same brotherhood, I don't know why after the depression and insomnia and all the fucking days at Wesleyan where I thought, "wow, this is what happiness feels like," I don't fucking know why for one second I ever believed that this place could've produced a brotherhood I would've believed in.

And so two days after the service, a student who was enough of a leader to be elected prefect but not enough of a leader to attend his dead classmate's funeral, posted in the Facebook group made in a dead boy's honor, reminding us to donate money to the school's fundraiser.

FUCK. YOU.

You don't get take four years of my life, leaving me broken and unguided and completely unprepared for this ever-changing world you prepared me for, and then come to my door begging for money.

FUCK. YOU.

There can be no complacency in the oppression of others, and there can certainly be no celebration in it. You're not my brother, you're a traumatizing thought I can't wipe from my mind who reappears every month or so to share something racist in my Facebook feed. The nostalgia is sickening to me. I do not long for those days of earnest striving. I long for amnesia.

I renounce the brotherhood. Take my shares. Remove my name from those plaques I worked so fucking hard to leave my mark on. Burn those photos of me on the wall of the theater. Erase every little thing I left at that horrid place. I need to wash away the scars you left on my body.

Maybe then, we can talk donations.

See you at the reunion.