I was a gay frat boy. The “horrific incident” at Bucknell University’s Fran’s House was not an anti-LGBT attack

The author (center) with friends on a typical night at his college apartment. (Photo: unknown)

Last weekend, approximately 20 drunk and belligerent men tried to gain access to Fran’s House, an LGBT living community on the campus of Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. The police were called, though the students in Fran’s House allege it took them an unreasonably long time to arrive and that, once they did, the cops were overly friendly with the intruders, laughing and shaking hands with them.

My first reaction upon reading this — as yours may well have been — was outrage. That the cops would act so blasé towards a marauding group of homophobic thugs was galling. But upon further reading, the picture becomes cloudier. The 20 drunk men, it turns out, used to live in the building, members of a fraternity disbanded by the university for hazing.

I have no doubt the residents of Fran’s House were frightened. A group of 20 drunk men trying to gain access to your dorm would be terrifying, especially if you did not know them. However, this was not a targeted attack on the LGBT community, rather a fraternity party gone too far. That distinction matters, because I do not want LGBT students feeling any less safe than they need to feel.

During my college years in the mid-00s, I straddled two worlds I called “gay world” and “Greek world.” I became the president of Western Kentucky University’s — my alma mater’s — official LGBT group my freshman year of college. I campaigned against the Kentucky amendment banning gay marriage that year, and in 2006 helped organize a protest when the University of the Cumberlands expelled a student for being gay. I fought hard through our university’s Student Government Association to maintain an LGBT safe space on our campus.

Yet, my social life was dominated by Greek life. I was never in a fraternity, but my closest friends then and now were the men of Sigma Nu and the women of Sigma Kappa. I dated fraternity men, I went to fraternity parties, and Greek Week — with its choreographed dance off and epic and muddy tug-of-war at the university farm — was the highlight of my social calendar.

I have a lot of experience with rowdy, unruly frat boys (a term itself that many fraternity members find offensive — “you wouldn’t call your country…