Apparently, I wasn’t the only gay Greek in the ‘90s who felt that lesbians and sororities didn’t mix. In 1996, while I was sneaking in late to my formal meeting, Christin Baker was pledging Zeta Tau Alpha sorority at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Initially, sorority life was a natural fit for Baker, who was active in campus activities and had student government aspirations.

When she began coming out her junior year, though, Baker also began pulling away from her sisters. “I pretty much stopped going to a lot of sorority things,” she recalls. “I would say, ‘Oh, I’m busy doing this that and the other.’ But really…I was slowly weaning myself away.”

Christin Baker

Why was Baker separating herself from her sorority? Because, while she doesn’t remember encountering any “overt anti-lesbian sentiment” in her sorority, Baker understood that the two worlds weren’t meant to intersect.

“You didn’t want anyone in your sorority to be gay,” she remembers. “If you had someone who was out that would be very, very bad. You probably would have kicked them out.” Baker recalls, “There were people who were out on campus, but not in a fraternity or sorority.”

Baker’s experience was less overt than that of Shane Windmeyer. When Windmeyer joined Phi Delta Theta at Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas in 1992 he was out to himself, but not to his brothers. As an underclassman, he remembers encountering homophobic comments and behavior from his fraternity brothers.

“It was the early nineties and the only thing you heard about gay people tended to be negative….so the environment of the fraternity house very much reflected the more conservative element of our society [with] homophobic jokes and harassment,” Windmeyer says. “One guy,” he remembers, “wore a shirt that said, ‘Silly faggot, dicks are for chicks.’”

Baker and Windmeyer’s experiences are not unique. A study conducted by Douglas Case in 1996 on the experiences of LGBT members of fraternities and sororities found that, “the heterocentric nature of Greek social activities, homophobic attitudes within organizations and the perceived need to hide their sexual orientation detracted from the Greek experience for many LGBT students.”

Despite the homophobic attitudes present in the Phi Delta Theta house, Windmeyer threw himself into his chapter. He held several offices, including Vice President of the fraternity.

“I think in my head I was trying to prove through my leadership in the house that I was still a good brother,” he speculates. “Like, if I help our philanthropy raise more money then somehow maybe me being gay won’t make a difference when I do come out.”

When Windmeyer finally came out his junior year, he says it was a learning experience for many of his brothers. “They never really thought about those words, those jokes affecting someone they cared about,” he says.

That experience lead Windmeyer to dedicate his professional life to studying sexual orientation as it pertains to the fraternity/sorority experience. He has written several books on the experiences of gays and lesbians in Greek organizations and travels to college campuses around the country, speaking to fraternities and sororities about what they can do to be more welcoming to gay and lesbian members.

Windmeyer says that, when it comes to being gay and Greek, “things have changed substantially over the last ten years.” His first speaking engagement was in 1998 at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado shortly after a fraternity and sorority mounted a scarecrow on their homecoming float with the word “fag” emblazoned on its face. At that same moment, a few miles away, Matthew Shepherd lay dying in a Fort Collins hospital from wounds sustained during a violent hate crime.

Ten years later, Windmeyer says that, “the younger generation today, the 16-28 year-olds, are more progressive….They’re much more open and accepting of gay people.”

In 1995, Windmeyer founded the Lambda 10 Project, a nonprofit clearinghouse dedicated to heightening awareness of issues that pertain to LGBT students in fraternities and sororities. In November 2008 the Lambda 10 Project hosted the Out & Greek Conference at DePaul University in Chicago – the first ever conference dedicated to sharing strategies for creating LGBT-inclusive fraternities and sororities.

While Windmeyer has been speaking and writing about LGBT issues in Greek life for years, he says, “This conference never would have been possible back in the mid nineties. It never would have been possible, I really don’t think, up until about two or three years ago….You just wouldn’t have been able to get people there.”

***

The opening session of the Out & Greek Conference, a panel entitled “LGBT Issues in the Greek System,” is attended by over fifty gay fraternity and sorority members from campuses across the country. Not bad, considering the panel is held at 9:30am. Also present are administrators and Greek advisors from a variety of universities. They are there to swap stories and exchange strategies for making Greek organizations on their campuses more accepting.

The session has the feel of a fraternity or sorority meeting. When a panelist makes a particularly good point, the room erupts in snaps of agreement. Several attendees wear Greek letters. Others wear the T-shirt handed out to participants that reads “Out & Greek Conference.” Because, let’s face it, it wouldn’t be a Greek event without a custom T-shirt.

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