Inclusion With A Caveat:
Sexuality, Gender Identity, & Expression Within Fraternity and Sorority Life
S T E V E N S A LVAT O R E G I A N N I N O
I am gay. It took 20 years to say those words openly. Before that, my sexuality was always in question. One of my earliest memories is my father calling me a “fairy” because I wanted to learn to tap dance like my big sister. I always knew I was different. I did not speak the same language as my father, uncles, male cousins, and friends. They talked about baseball and football, and I talked about Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. I received weird looks from relatives as my father made jokes to excuse my apparently egregious sin. It was not so apparent to me. I never knew what I had done wrong … figure skating is a sport, right? Throughout elementary school and up to my first year of high school, classmates used words like “f***ot,” “queer,” “fairy,” and “fruit” to describe me. These words became weapons, used like daggers to wound my self-esteem. They were also words used to reconcile in their minds why I was not a “normal” boy. How could a boy prefer to jump rope with the girls 27
rather than wrestle in the dirt? I wondered the same. On those tough days, I did not have the luxury of going home to find comfort or commonality. No one in my family “looked” like me. They openly admitted they did not understand me. Rather than offering kindness or explaining why I may be different, my father told me to stop being a sissy and start playing with the boys. That became my internal narrative for the next several years. Coming of age in the late 1990s and early 2000s, my understanding of the gay experience was limited to horror stories I saw on the news and characterizations of Jack McFarland from the show “Will and Grace.” Those realities were not an option for me. I lived in fear that if someone learned the truth of my sexual identity my family would abandon me, or I would be tortured and left to die like Matthew Shepard. The only choice that seemed reasonable was to learn to live with my secret hidden deep in the closet.
