Notes From A Gay Man Turned Frat Bro

As recently as, oh, this summer, I thought of Greek Life as a glorified book club — minus the book; a sacred allegiance to getting absurdly drunk four times a week in an effort to find community. My opinion wasn’t even critical: everybody knows that the bonds drunk teenagers forge are among the strongest achievable.

But I saw the Greek system as very binary, exclusive, and cookie-cutter, no matter what diversity an organization may boast on its website. I am not that person; I fit into no cookie-cutter whatsoever, and nor have I ever.

At the University of Southern California, where I am a sophomore, about 7,300 of our 21,000 undergraduate students are members of various sororities and fraternities. In my freshman year, I absolutely did not understand why girls sobbed through their mascara when “running home” to Alpha Gonorrhea Zeta or Kappa Mitch McConnell Phi.

At the beginning of my time at USC, I tried to figure out a way to fit in; to force myself to be at least cookie-cutter adjacent. I briefly changed my clothing, personality, and even morals to fit into what I thought the “gay best friend” of a sorority girl’s friend group should look like.

As I once saw somebody on TikTok say, every gay man must endure being treated like a rabid sorority house chihuahua by the most malevolent group of women on earth before they find the group of lesbians who genuinely love them. And I was doing the work.

My brand has always been pretty girls.

Back at home in New York City, I think that I was relatively well-known amongst the straight male population for having beautiful female friends.

A boy once swiped up on the birthday story of my friend and said, “You are just a legend.” Another time, a boy whom I’d never even heard of before told me at a party that he wished he could live my life, “minus the gay part.” If anything is mutually exclusive in this life, it’s my existence and heterosexuality.

But I never quite understood this straight male fascination with my friendships. Sometimes, boys would even ask me if I was “faking it” to “get into the sleepover.” A boy who gets grounded at age 15 for siphoning hundreds of dollars from his parents’ credit card to buy skincare at Sephora is not faking anything.

I tried to have male friendships for many years without much luck, at least until the tail end of high school. In sixth grade, I was exiled from the all-girl friend group of my tiny middle school (we forgive, but we never forget) because the mothers apparently didn’t want a boy walking with their daughters to Hebrew school each Monday and Wednesday.

Again, weird — homosexuality in youth is always a bizarre limbo in which you’re seen as an outsider to everyone. The girls never viewed me as one of them, yet the boys would view me as one of the girls, without the preferential treatment with which they treated girls who were first discovering the concept of a push-up bra.

Nobody wants to be “other,” something that I only made peace with very recently.

My mom, ever the loving and gracious soul that she is, facilitated a few boys from my grade to come to our apartment and hang out.

It was perfectly fine. But pizza and ESPN were ultimately not the recipe for my perfect friendship.

I am not ashamed to admit that I required a little drama.

After all, my childhood icons were Regina George and two identical twin girls in my kindergarten class who mercilessly berated me, which did nothing to quell my obsession.

After my brief era of post-quarantine obesity, I methodically amassed my army of beautiful, chic friends. Who doesn’t want to be beautiful or surrounded by beautiful people, especially when they’re 16 years old?

Let’s pause for a moment. I want to note that I never befriended people solely based on appearances; I’ve never been great at hiding my feelings, and I… struggle with the intelligently challenged (read: dumb). Though I retrospectively feel that some of those individuals were rather vapid beneath their shiny, Keratin-treated blonde hair and belt-length skirts, I never formed friendships simply for how their beauty would reflect on my Instagram page (though it reflected well, and continues to!).

The thing about being friends with pretty girls is that you attract guys who want to be around them (or inside of them, if we’re speaking frankly). So, by my junior year in high school, there was a greater gender balance in my friend group, even near equilibrium. I felt that I had normalized myself and relationships with other males. I now believe that it is essential for individuals to have same-sex friendships regardless of sexuality or conformity.

One of these male friends was particularly manipulative: it seemed that this individual intentionally blurred the boundaries of the platonic and the romantic in our relationship, leaving me so confused and depressed. This individual, who truly was one of my best friends for a very developmentally significant period of my adolescence, often leveraged emotional intimacy to gain access to my friends… and eventually slept with more than half a dozen of them before abandoning me to scream the bridge to Ride by Lana Del Rey into the abyss of my family’s forested upstate home: I’m tired of feeling like I’m fucking crazy!

Coming to USC as a freshman was very different. It was abundantly clear that any straight males were almost allergic to any association with me. Of course, this was hurtful and confusing, and further thrust me into the aforementioned projection of who I was “supposed” to be — and I decided to focus on an expansion of the beautiful empire.

By the second month of USC:

Dimes all around! This was for a ski-themed fraternity party, and you can also clearly see the somewhat hyper-feminine elements of my outfit, at the peak of my misguided “reinvention.”

Second semester, however, I became friends with two girls who I now call some of my favorite friends at USC: Sienna and Susanna (not pictured). Sienna knew a boy named Gavin from their shared hometown of Miami, whom I had known for many years through Jewish geography. He pitched me an idea: that I become a “social bid” to his fraternity.

What’s a social bid, you may ask? It’s a quid pro quo: I have the honor of the brotherhood and access to the house, parties, food, etc., while I am expected to rally the maximum number of dimes to show up every single time a party is thrown.

I was like, “Yeah…let me get back to you on that one, Gav.” I was just absolutely opposed to the idea and found it entirely unnecessary. But my mother had different ideas. She thought that if I was frustrated by exclusion from the system that all of my friends had gravitated into, I should stop being on the margins and accept the opportunity. Plus, she, her older sister, and their mother were all Kappa Kappa Gammas at the University of Michigan, and my grandfather was a Zeta Beta Tau. That’s how my grandparents met: I suppose, without Greek Life and the bad choices that alcohol induces, I would not exist.

So, I took the bid, albeit apprehensively. Sienna and Susanna became the fraternity’s “Sweethearts,” and I became a social bid. The difference in my life from the first semester of freshman year to this current first semester of sophomore year feels immense — all of a sudden, I am a member of the Greek system that I previously didn’t understand; a paying member of the illiterate book club.

Best of all, merely halfway through my first semester of brotherhood, I think I’ve gleaned some new insight into the straight male mind.

To begin: It is not very complex.

I am not shading. (I am not heterophobic — trademark pending — by any means: I support the right of straight couples to marry, buy a home, or even adopt a child.) Sometimes a lack of complexity is a beautiful thing.

It’s almost refreshing to go there after a long day, and nobody seems to want to do much other than laugh, play video games, watch sports, and hit the bong (CBD only, obviously). I don’t play video games. As we learned from my pizza party in sixth grade, I don’t care for sports unless you count the recent Victoria’s Secret show (on which I have thoughts that veer into the Def offensive and thus will be kept private). I will not hit the bong as Malala Yousafzai has fear-mongered me through the recounting of her shaking-and-screaming incident at Oxford.

None of this is to say that there is a lack of emotion at the fraternity. It’s just that the emotion is chill rather than dramatic.

And unlike my high school male friendships, these feel authentic. Within these frat friendships, I often find that they prefer it when I come without my girlfriends. It’s just such a relief — they don’t want the drama, and for a change, neither do I. Okay, that’s a lie…but it’s perfectly true that I enjoy a few hours a week of tranquility! There is truly a concept of brotherhood; the top priority is positive friendships.

Still, all of my home friends and even my USC friends are utterly stunned and completely confused that I am in a frat.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Is it a gay frat? No.

Is this an early-to-mid-life crisis? Perhaps.

Do they know you’re gay? Let’s use our brains. If the vocal fry is deeper than McDonald’s pans and tight women’s jeans don’t give it away, I don’t know what would.

Plus, secondary to my brand of always being with beautiful girls is my brand of being downright controversial. What could be more scandalous than a gay man living and loving the frat life? I mean, I have always lived by the Karl Lagerfeld quote: “Sweatpants are a sign of defeat. You lost control of your life, so you bought some sweatpants.” My new brothers wear sweatpants every day! One of them saw the framed portrait of Kate Moss smoking a cigarette in my room and asked, “Is that your mom?” (Yes.) Absolutely outrageous and indeed a shock to the system, but just easy and low-stakes enough to be oddly comforting.

There is a real perspicuity in the dynamics and expectations of the house that I think is underrated or misunderstood. Growing up surrounded solely by girls, I had a notion of friendship that it needed to be built on the sturdy foundation of insurmountable trust, a cycle of conflict, engagement, and resolution (unremitted blocking and unblocking — which I thought went out in 2021 but seems to be making a comeback in 2025), fierce and blind loyalty, and emotional telepathy.

While those things may eventually come as more time passes in my new fraternal friendships, the simplicity of enjoying each other’s company is refreshing.

There doesn’t need to be water under the bridge to build the bridge — it just stands.