Silver Legionnaire's Disease

I woke up very late this morning (well, two p.m.) but I feel marvelous, with no hangover to darken my door. Last night I had the great pleasure of revisiting my past in a way that I usually don't at the Phi Delta Theta fraternity annual Founder's Day dinner. The dinner took place at Alumni Hall in the stately Victoria College on the University of Toronto campus.

One of the little-known facts about my personal history is that I used to be a frat boy. Yep, a 1980's-style one. I learned to drink beer at our house on St. George Street, just off campus. I had come to U or T after four years at St. John's Cathedral Boy's School, a very rugged Anglican prep school on the Manitoba prairies, and a year of modeling in Paris, Montreal, and Toronto. The cultural schizophrenia of that flight path alone might have been enough of a reason to draw me to a college frat.

I loved those guys, but the business of coming out as a gay man was sort of all-encompassing, and while my friends there were very supportive, there were a couple who were quite nasty. I'll keep their names to myself, but frankly they were reason enough to distance myself from my Phi Delt brothers. The sadness was in the realization that other friendships that had sprung up wouldn't ever evolve because of the distance.

Over the course of the last 25 years since my initiation I've had less contact with them than I would might have liked, but we were all busy making our lives happen, the ones we dreamed of when we were 20. Sitting with these men at the ceremony on Founders Day was an absurdly touching experience for me. The young guys coming up were all uniformly intelligent and decent. I could almost forgive them the fact that the frat house was now booze-free (seriously, I miss the 80s sometimes more than others.) It's another marker of passing time, though unlike some, this was a sweet one.

I don't know how long it'll be before I see these guys again, but seeing them all that night at the ceremony, so dignified now, but still with the sparkle of mischief that true frat boys never lose, I was reminded of what an honour it had been--and still is--to call them "Brothers in the Bond."