----------Brotherly love
-------One man remembers the joys and compromises
-------of living in the fraternity's closet.

BY L.E. WILSON | When he was drunk, Derek used to kiss me on the cheek, just there. And Ray had eyes like silky blue opals, and a smile to melt a virgin's vow. Reeve was tall, dark, deep-voiced, the descendant of deposed European royalty, and he smoked a huge meerschaum pipe like Sherlock Holmes. And Gerry and I ran together, talked together until 3 a.m. of love and loss and family and our shadowy hopes for our changeable futures.

This is true: My two years in the fraternity were among the best and happiest of my life.

This is also true: I was deeply frustrated sexually, infatuated with half of my fraternity brothers and constantly afraid of being found out.

This is so far beyond "mixed blessing," so much more than "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times," such a tangle of mutually exclusive emotions, that I do not know if it will go into words sensibly -- though it might make sense to someone else who has been there, "there" being just one more flexible term in the flux of this memory.

In the fall of 1977, when I was a junior at Illinois Wesleyan, a small Midwestern university, I joined the local chapter of Sigma Pi, a large international fraternity. I already knew many of the brothers socially, had dined with them, partied with them, shared classes and committees and honor societies with them. Their house had the highest grade point average on campus, a policy against pledge hazing of any kind and no one in the house smoked or used drugs. And, perhaps most importantly (but never to be spoken of aloud), my best friend in the theater department, a blue-eyed hunk on whom I had had a crush since freshman orientation, was a brother. When I asked him tentatively about pledging, and after he had spoken about me to the others, the general consensus was that I would be good for the house and that the house would be good for me. "Good for" a very young 20-year-old, a skittish virgin, barely out to myself, much less anyone else.

My pledge class of 20 was mostly freshmen, with a handful of sophomores and one other junior. We were required to learn the names, hometowns and girlfriends of all of the active members of the house -- but, oddly for the Greek environment of the late '70s, the actives were required to learn the same of us. The pledge class had to train together for a relay race at homecoming, had to dress in suits and ties one day a week, and had to memorize the fraternity's national history and that of our local chapter. There were no paddlings, no sleepless hell nights, no incidents with barnyard animals (about which we had heard rumors over at the Animal House frat). We were not even referred to as "pledges," but as "junior members." Civilized. Plus, there were dances and exchanges with sororities, float building, skit practice all during a semester in which I had parts in three theater productions, worked a part-time job on campus and stayed on the dean's list. On top of that, I was given the "most valuable junior member" award, and I was elected an officer of the fraternity a few months later.

I was valued by my brothers, very much valued -- but it was for feminine things, somehow.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Late-night massages, brutal rugby, broken hearts