In my second year of college, I missed high school. What I missed was the band hall. I reminisced about my best friend flirting with her longtime girlfriend, my sly realist poking at my idealistic bubble, or the gaggle of people that floated around us in our aura of support. We had created a gay-straight alliance without meetings. Soon, we were interrupted by college, and I lost my community.

I spent the next year lost in the swarms. Bright lights lit up every word. Queer Straight Alliance! College Democrats! Ordinary Women! Nothing felt right. I had spent my community on the promises of a brighter tomorrow, only to go broke. As a gay man, the gay community that I depended on in high school now relied on rumors and booze. The more I stayed in college, the more I longed for high school. We had a vocabulary problem. My definition of queer meant support, community, and coffee. To me, their definition meant sex, gossip, booze. I could not rectify those differences. I struggled against my own idealism, fearing that I had run out of steam. Then, Google happened.

On a misplaced remark, I discovered the Gay Greek. Twenty minutes on the Internet, too much enthusiasm, and a national election later, Delta Lambda Phi at Kansas State University gave birth — to me and my brothers. That moment could not have come any sooner. Three months later, I tripped into near suicidal depression.

Spring of 2005, I spent most of March and April locked in my house. If I left, I found myself puking randomly or being so nervous while driving I had to pull over while my anxiety attack subsided. I barely resembled the founding president from a few months earlier. I slept twelve hours a day for weeks. I stopped seeing my therapist. The medical community was for refills or medicating the side effects. The only constant in my life, and what eventually pulled me through, was my fraternity brothers — The Delta Lambda Phi boys.

My fraternity brothers watched over me while I played Russian roulette with psychotropic medications. They empathized as I cried during Duracell commercials, and I beat up myself up over being so fragile. Emerging with Effexor, I could find myself again underneath the battle scars of medication with the community that I had hoped to find but instead was privileged to build.

Brett Currier