ABSTRACT
Several years ago, a friend of mine living abroad began a correspondence with me attempting to solidify a friendship that had been dormant for several seasons. As part of the letter exchange, we compared experiences of discovering our gayness during our undergraduate careers, a process complicated considerably by having the closet door half open, half closed. His journey differed from mine in one rather significant way: during his college years, he was an active member of a fraternity, Alpha Tau Omega (ATO), at a time not so long ago when being out would mean immediate social ostracization. While the fraternity years were indeed marked by very careful bracketing of certain portions of his life, my friend unearthed several other guys in the fraternity who were also gay or at least curious. The result was a vibrant, hidden subculture referred to as the "GayTOs" by its members. To me, the reminiscence offered a life lesson, first and foremost, in the boundaries drawn between the homosocial and the homosexual. Nevertheless, the story also demonstrated how the realms of homo-
sociality and homosexuality are potentially fluid, with the male bonding at the heart of the homosocial flirting at the possibility of homosexuality. The division between the two is bolstered by social convention and dominant social norms, but undermined time and again by attraction and desire.
