Greek system

My workload that semester had been more than overwhelming, and I was running tight on money, so attending every Greek event wasn’t realistic. Additionally, I hadn’t been excused for missing our sorority’s weekly meeting because I had missed them to study, which didn’t count as an acceptable excuse.

Living in a sorority began to feel like taking one step toward adulthood and then three steps back. Looking back now, I could never imagine myself in a house where my male friends were banned from my room after 10, and I was subject to an overbearing housing contract. To me, it felt like in order to assure that no girls broke Panhellenic trust, we were simply not given any trust to begin with.

Weeks before I left for California, I spent my afternoon researching UC Berkeley and what clubs and societies there were to get involved in. Pictures of sorority houses and sisterhood events flooded my webpage, and it seemed to me like sororities were so essential to the American college experience.

I want people to know that we gays, though small in number, are here, and we want you. Let’s slowly work to overthrow the straight people’s dominance of Greek life — from the inside.

At each of the colleges I attended, I learned how the gender binary is used to dole out reward and punishment, employed to justify discrimination.

It's date party season, and you know what that means: You'll spend hours of your life thinking about dresses, makeup and shoes so that a dude you've never met before in Rho Alpha Pi Eta will — I don't know — attempt to validate your self-worth through physical appearance alone or something?