Illustration: Katerina Dalavurak

Ian Gray’s bedroom is not what you would expect for a stereotypical frat boy.  Multicolored teacups hang from the wall.  On the desk lies a tea cozy and a selection of bags: Earl Grey, English breakfast, peppermint.  A keyboard lies propped in the corner and an American flag dominates one of the walls.  Opposite the flag, a projector hangs from the top bunk of a wooden bunk bed.

To Ian Gray and Jeff Herman, sophomores and proud members of Alpha Epsilon Pi, this is home.

Brown University hosts six fraternities: Alpha Epsilon Pi, Delta Phi, Delta Tau, Sigma Chi, Theta Delta Chi and Zeta Delta Xi.  Movies like Animal House typify frats as a loud, politically incorrect party.  Frat boys are portrayed as sports-obsessed beer-drinkers who never seem to make it to class.  But Gray and other Brunonian frat boys dispel these labels and describe the frats more as a community of friends.

Gray transferred to Brown from DePaul University in Chicago, a Catholic school, which, as he described, “was not the best place to come out.” Though he pledged AEPi at DePaul and had a gay big brother, Gray says Brown is generally more liberal and open—qualities he says translate across the Greek system as well.

“De Paul is more socially conservative, and it’s harder for gay kids in general,” he said. “It’s not the university’s fault, it’s a product of the student body.”

While Gray has had a positive experience with Greek life at Brown, he experienced some homophobia when he visited University of Michigan—a school where fraternity life is more prominent.  He made the trip there with his roommate Jeff Herman.

“I heard some homophobic slang, but it was not directed at us,” Gray said.  If you were a brother, you would be respected. They had immediate respect for fellow members.”

Another difference he noted between the AEPi chapter at a big-name university and the one at Brown is that the activities are more monitored by the university here at Brown, something Gray thinks is positive.

“You can’t get away with as much as at DePaul. The frats are much more protected by the university . . . Wriston Quad is a good place where people in and out of frats can live together.”

Gray’s decision to rush again at Brown came from a senior he met at WBRU who had made close friends in AEPi. He also found four friends who lived in his hallway that wanted to join too.

“It’s a lucky miracle that we all ended up in the same place,” he said. “It’s the right way to do it, to start off with a community of friends from freshman year that grew to include a larger community of brothers.”

It is the community aspect that Gray describes as the best thing about being in a frat—besides the Thursday night Chipotle runs and Monday night football.

“It’s nice to be able to walk down the hallway and find friends to hang out with on a whim,” he said. “There is no place else you can find friends like that.”

Gray, a native of Chicago, initially decided to attend DePaul University to try to graduate from high school early. When he couldn’t, he stayed on at DePaul while he tried to figure out where he wanted to earn his degree.

“While I was looking at colleges, Brown was at the bottom of my list,” he said.

Ultimately, he ended up at Brown because of his high school teacher, Andy Kaplan. He introduced Gray to the Progressive Method—a philosophy in education that stresses student-directed learning—and told him to take a look at Brown because he thought it would be a fit for him.

Despite his initial ambivalence to the school, Gray is almost as passionate about his Brown experience as he is about AEPi.

“It’s really just a group of cool nerds,’” he said. “This is an environment where your mind is constantly being expanded. The best thing to ask at Brown is: ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’”

In addition to AEPi, Gray, a philosophy major, writes papers for Brown philosophy conferences and works as a DJ for WBRU.  He also fixes old computers as a hobby, the evidence of which is lying on his desk.  He and Herman take the American flag off the wall to host movie nights and project videogames. The flag was a present to Gray from his congresswoman when he worked as a page in Washington D.C. Though never a Boy Scout, Gray knows how to fold the flag properly and brags that it “has yet to touch the ground.”

An only child, Gray has a good home life and gets along with his parents, who he said were supportive when he decided to come out.

When he came out, he said, “I just went up to my parents and said ‘I have something to say to you. My mother asked me if I wrecked the car and I said, ‘No. I’m gay.’”

Though Gray joined a Jewish fraternity and attended a Catholic university, neither of his parents practices their religions. His father is a cultural Jew and his mother was raised Catholic.  He went to DePaul because it was only four blocks from where his parents lived.

If he has any complaints about frat life here it is only that it seems inaccessible to the rest of the student body, and that even Brown cannot rise above the Animal House stereotypes.

At a university where only 12% of students go Greek, fraternities and sororities make up a minority community. Gray and a few of his brothers at AEPi believe that Brown students are closed to Greek life in general. Gray said that he hopes the university gives the student body a better chance to understand them.

Another openly gay fraternity brother, Xander Tabloff, a member of Sigma Chi, has had a similarly positive experience at Brown.

“Honestly, I joined a fraternity because my friends were mostly girls, and since I want to be a lawyer, I wanted to have a better understanding of interactions between straight males.  It’s one thing you need to know to be successful.”

Tabloff cites the diversity at Brown in general as the main reason Sigma Chi and other fraternities are so inclusive.

“I’m dating someone who goes to Harvard, and he comes up to stay about every other weekend,” Tabloff said. “My roommate doesn’t care. We had a formal here last year and I brought him to that and everybody was fine with it.”

Gray’s friends and fraternity brothers, sophomores Scott Linstone and Eliot Tang-Smith, said that like Gray, they fell into fraternity life by chance.

“I never expected to join a frat,” Tang-Smith said. “In fact, my girlfriend made fun of me when she found out I was pledging AEPi. It just seemed like a group of really cool people.”

Like Gray, neither Linstone nor Tang-Smith are practicing Jews and both joke that most people join AEPi for the food.

That appears to be a selling point for Gray, as he cleans his teacups and puts away the sugar and lemon. He has a plastic cheeseball dispenser under his desk and a jumbo size box of York mints on top.

“This is our home and you need to take care of your home,” he said. “That’s why I always have food in my room. I almost bought $7 caviar the other day. It’s really important for your home to be inviting to guests.”