Donning a t-shirt proclaiming, "Gay or Straight: It's All Greek to Me," Shane Windmeyer's sense of humor promised an attention-grabbing lecture in McConomy last Wednesday, October 19, even before it began. Co-editor of "Out on Fraternity Row: Personal Accounts of Being Gay in a College Fraternity," Windmeyer recounted his experiences about coming out to his fraternity and family. ALLIES, cmuOUT, IFC, SoHo, and Student Senate sponsored Windmeyer as the keynote speaker for Gay Pride Month.

Windmeyer first addressed the issue of the "cycle of invisibility," which describes how people do not feel comfortable coming out, and consequently, others are not aware of their sexual orientation.

Windmeyer asked for four straight audience members, two female and two male who belonged to fraternities and sororities, to participate in a four-question quiz to determine their GPA, or "Gay Point Average." While he gave the participants colorful feather boas to wear and allowed for a bonus round in which they were able to gain a point for doing a z-snap to various music clips, Windmeyer was trying to show how there are few people who know about homosexuals beyond the stereotypes.

"In reality, we need to get to know gay people because they are just as diverse as straight people and not just caricatures," Windmeyer asserted. "We are people of faith, we are people of different ethnic backgrounds."

During the presentation, the audience confirmed that the gay flag is rainbow-colored, that the geometric shape that represents gays and lesbians is the triangle, and that the Greek letter associated with the gay and lesbian movement is lambda. What the audience generally did not realize is that there is a history behind all of these representations. For example, Windmeyer explained that the pink triangle is a symbol that came out of the concentration camps during World War II. Though homosexuals were forced to wear them then, it is now an icon of empowerment.

After calculating the "GPA" of the audience participants, Windmeyer had the all of the attendees of the lecture skim over a slip of paper with the sentence "finished files are the result of years of scientific study combined with the experience of many years," in order to see how many letter "F"s they could find. This was used as a filtering exercise, analogous to how we are not always as attentive as we should be to those around us.  

As Windmeyer said, "We look at the world with sunglasses. And these sunglasses determine what we see and what we don't see, who we do and do not interact with."

Windmeyer addressed the fact that homosexuals become involved in Greek life because it provides them with social support as well as a sense of camaraderie and family. A survey completed ten years ago showed that 80 percent of Greek gays and lesbians served in executive leadership in their fraternities and sororities. Windmeyer explained that keeping busy was an excuse for having no social life, and working hard within the organizations was a way of coping with coming out. According to Windmeyer, the majority of homosexual fraternity brothers and sorority sisters who had not already come out of the closet were afraid that they would no longer be accepted once they did inform others about their sexual orientation, and wanted to believe that if they proved themselves as being devoted to their institution by overachieving, they would not be kicked out or denounced. Windmeyer said that men are particularly afraid of being viewed as "less than men," whereas women are more concerned about losing friends when their sexual preferences are revealed.

Windmeyer recalled holding onto this fear as well. His fraternity brothers constantly told anti-gay jokes, which troubled him. When Windmeyer joined the gay-straight alliance, Safe Zone, during his junior year in college, the flyer he put on the door was torn down. It was taken down again when he put up the flyer a second time, and he was certain that whoever was doing it was making a statement against homosexuals. When Windmeyer finally decided to tell his fraternity brothers the truth about himself, they were initially shocked. Because Windmeyer views a brother or sister as an ally, a person who will "stand up for people who don't have a voice," he was glad to see that they still supported him after that initial shock. Windmeyer felt that without their encouragement, he personally would have resorted to taking drugs or committing suicide.

Although verbal harassment and vandalism are the most common forms of hate crimes that gays face, Windmeyer stated that, "It's not what we say, it's what we don't say… that silence speaks much louder than any of our words." According to Windmeyer, keeping quiet about these issues gives the impression that we allow intolerance to exist or that we give permission for it to go on, so "we need to take action and not just be spectators." It is important especially for college students to be informed because "our campuses in general are our leaders of tomorrow."

For more information, the following websites were recommended at the lecture: the Lambda 10 Project and Campus PrideNet.

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