Two Gay College Brothers Lose Each Other
By: Laurence Best
Tags: Coming Of Age, Family, Coming Out, LGBTQ, Creative Non Fiction

Two Gay College Brothers Lose Each Other

Lemor Zellermayer/Upsplash.com

My high school frat brother Freddie Yoder asked me to join him for rush parties as soon as we registered for college. I probably would have skipped them if he hadn’t. He wanted free beer, but he had a specific fraternity in mind. His sister was the Teke Sweetheart and had dated the president since high school. I figured if I wanted a college social life, Freddie was the way in.

The fraternities were stereotyped. The Lambda Chi Alphas were the nerdy good students, Phi Kappa Theta were the cool guys, Theta Xi the gross-out gang, and Sigma Alpha Mu was for Jewish students. TKE were jocks and so the least likely fit for me. I quietly aspired to PKT but made no effort because I knew Freddie would get me in TKE.

The TKE rush party at Luigi’s Pizza Parlor boasted a table of gleaming athletic trophies. There were no fraternity houses because all the members were commuters living at home.

Frat President Alan Lichtenwalter stood at one end of the trophy display in creased slacks, buttoned-down shirt, and a fraternity pin with a tiny gavel signifying his rank.

Freddy introduced us.

Alan was friendly and gracious, but that night I had no inkling how close we would become. After flipping through the fraternity photo album with him, we had a couple of beers, and then Freddy and I moved on to other parties.

I checked off only Teke on my rush ballot the following week because Freddy assured me he had let them know we were a package deal. Sure enough, we were soon officially pledged.

Each member selected a pledge to be his “little brother.” Alan, as president, had first choice. He chose Freddy, whom he considered a family obligation, but he also chose me. While I did not attach much significance to having a big brother, especially since I was not fond of my own, Alan took an interest in me.

He gave me a list of members’ names, their majors, and the names of their girlfriends so I could learn these as a sign of respect and of my seriousness about joining the fraternity. He schooled me on their peculiarities so I could stay out of trouble.

He offered the same guidance to Freddy who was less concerned about it all. He was an average guy who got along with others easily. I, on the other hand, was used to being an outcast.

Alan and I formed a bond that would grow over time. He persuaded me to keep my mouth shut and not say the first ironic, sarcastic, or disrespectful thing that popped into my head. While I did not care for several older members who seemed of an entirely different generation, I did come to like others and formed friendships that have endured. Alan laughingly referred to me as “High School Harry,” meaning I needed to grow up.

I was regularly at Alan’s house, met his welcoming family, and became a sort of mascot. If Alan was somewhere, I was not too far away even though he was three years older. We dressed alike, shared the same dream of law school and a lucrative career, and both wanted luxury cars with “power windows,” which became our inside joke.

The striking thing about Alan was that he absolutely accepted me and genuinely liked me as I was. When I was with him, nothing was wrong with me, a remarkable and unaccustomed experience I failed to fully appreciate. With everyone else, I felt defective, sensing they wanted me to be more “regular.”

Not with Alan.

He didn’t care that my parents were divorced or my mother was a glorified secretary. He didn’t like sports any more than I did. He didn’t mind that I was not religious even though his family was. And he did not mind I was usually broke. He never made fun of me for anything and seemed interested in what I thought.

With him, I was at home in the world.

He could always count on me for help with the fraternity projects he constantly made happen, from a magnificent rush display he called The Castle, planned, built, and hand-antiqued in cherry and gray including a striped awning in the center over the trophies, to each year’s homecoming float, which always won first prize.

All Alan had to do to correct me was to stare at me with pursed lips, hands-on-hips, his left eyebrow sharply raised, and sternly speak a drawn-out “Larrreee!” followed by his signature chuckle. I would have followed him anywhere.

We double-dated occasionally, Alan always with Ann. We had fun, though she was too serious for my taste. In fairness, she was working more than full time to save for their wedding. Marriage and children were on her mind, and she seemed already there while the rest of us focused on the next crawfish boil.

As we grew closer, we began to smoke the same brand of cigarettes. Then we both bought tasseled Weejuns because penny loafers were suddenly out. Soon, one of my tassels on one shoe fell off. Alan helped me retrace my steps all over campus looking for it with no luck. He then suggested I cut one of the two tassels on the good shoe leaving one tassel per shoe to match. When I protested, he got a scissors and cut off one of the tassels on each of his own nearly new shoes and announced we were starting a new fad. Sure enough a few other brothers followed and Alan named it “Teke Style.” Surely no one had a better friend.

Alan was creative, confident, and competent. He was a history major who always got As and expected me to do well. He knew the university deans and administrators and was Teke’s representative on the Inter-Fraternity Council. He didn’t have an envious, jealous, or mean bone in his body. I thought he would be a great success someday, perhaps as a lawyer or corporate leader. I did not think I would succeed in the world nearly as well as he would.

My time with Alan was limited. He was a senior when I pledged so we would have only one year together. He planned to marry Ann after graduation and go on to law school.

The Vietnam War changed everything.

He would be classified 1-A after graduation, become an infantry second lieutenant and cannon fodder for the Viet Cong. So he deferred graduation by changing his major, buying an additional year. As his delayed graduation approached and the war’s body count rose, his father managed to get him into the Navy submarine service, the only available safe option.

Then, just before Alan’s graduation, he broke his engagement with Ann. I was shocked because Alan was nothing if not reliable. This did not sound like him at all.



When I called to find out what had happened, he wearily explained that he could not in good conscience marry and then go off to war. He had struggled and concluded it just was not fair to Ann. He asked her to postpone the wedding, a suggestion that angered her after all the saving and planning.

She would not budge and neither would he. As far as she was concerned, if the wedding was off, they were too. Alan stood his ground and that was the abrupt end of their long relationship.

I was getting ready to go to Detroit for the summer with Bruce. His father had just been transferred by Ford, so Bruce was going home for the summer to a place he’d never been. He asked me to come along for an “adventure.”

I needed to spend some time with Alan before I left.

The recent gay business with Will Higgins was unfinished. I was troubled by my sexual attraction that day in his apartment. I had fought this demon for years, and things seemed to have gotten worse. No matter how many girls I had sex with or how much I enjoyed it, I was simply not like regular guys.

This troubled and frightened me.

I felt Alan was somehow like me, that maybe we were both struggling with a peculiar physical attraction to men that was destructive and led nowhere. I cannot say why I thought that. Alan had given me no cause. No gossip flew around like with Will.

I wanted to talk to Alan about it but didn’t know how. One day we were riding down Elysian Fields in his parents’ burgundy Impala, the air-conditioned cabin filled with our Tareyton cigarette smoke. I was trembling with anxiety. Time was running out. It was now or not at all.

I remembered a party where the older members of TKE had wanted to throw me into a swimming pool for reasons I never understood. When I refused to resist and shouted “Fine! Just get it over with!” they were deflated. I had taken all of the fun out of it.

Then a thuggish member I disliked intensely said, “Of course! He’s Alan Lichtenwalter Jr.” I understood that as an insult to both of us, a message that neither of us was a regular guy. He might as well have called us queers.

The memory reminded me of how much we had in common. Alan was kind and decent. I knew I could trust him, yet no words came, nor could I imagine any that would serve.

I wanted to suggest we were struggling with the same defect, wordlessly, like a mime. I needed to know there was someone else like me in the world. I thought if I had even one person to share my private hell, I could go on and live an ordinary life.

I considered reaching for his crotch, but this was not about sex and I did not want to send the wrong signal. I loved Alan, though I would not have put it that way. I was not sexually attracted to him. He was my beloved big brother, a man unlike any in my life.

As we breezed down the avenue, I metaphorically leapt of the cliff by grabbing his wrist and pulling his hand toward my crotch. As bizarre as that sounds, in the moment, it seemed the only way to make him see me.

Alan resisted. I could feel the strength in his arm as he pulled back like we were arm wrestling. I could see confusion and fear in his eyes.

I let go and nearly wept with relief, but I had to explain what had just happened. I let out a long breath and confessed I thought about men even though I didn’t want to. I told him I felt so alone and didn’t know how to deal with it.

I said, “I thought you might understand.”

Alan stared straight ahead at the street. Then he said with a stern voice and precise words, “We must not speak about this … not ever.”

That told me all I needed to know and maybe all I could take.

We were the same; we both had to pretend otherwise and go on as the world demanded, as if even this precious moment had not happened.

We did not exist, because we were not allowed to exist. We could not just be, nor could we speak of who we were, not if we were to survive. The world offered us no place unless we worked to resemble others.

So we moved wordlessly on.

Alan went off to war, and I went back to believing I was mostly straight with an insubstantial dash of gay. Over the summer in Michigan with Bruce, I reconnected with my high school sweetheart, Julie Guten, leading to our marriage after my college graduation.

Alan went to Connecticut for submarine training and, while there, mailed me the Woodstock flyer.

Two years later, Alan was discharged in Hawaii and remained for graduate school in art history. During my first year of law school, he came home to visit his family and attended a party Julie and I hosted. When I asked, “What happened to law school?” he explained, “I served my country for two years in a tin can under the ocean. Now I can study whatever I want on the GI Bill. I will love every minute of it!”

Eventually, I stopped hearing from him. I thought to contact his parents for his address, but the pressures of a new law career, soon followed by children, were such that I never did so. I kept thinking he would call me when he came home to visit, but that never happened.