I loved my fraternity experience and still hold friendships established there as the ones I can count on the most. Fraternities at their best are like sports, t

I loved my fraternity experience and still hold friendships established there as the ones I can count on the most. Fraternities at their best are like sports, they make good men better and bring out the best qualities. At their worst they're binge drinking clubs with little more than mysoginistic, homophobic and racist behavior to bond over. Very tribal, which seems to be the default nature of us. That said, I know my experience was very different than most. We had a dry house, we had white, black, indian and plenty of others. We were mostly straight, but had a few brothers come out as gay during or after college, to encouragement and support. We ran our own house, doing any repairs and improvements ourselves, we cooked for ourselves, at one point I ran a kitchen that served nearly 100 people a night. It wasn't perfect, there were plenty of disagreements about how involved we should or shouldn't be on campus, what kind of budget we should have for a band party, how often we should have meetings and a million other things. I can look back and see that these things, and the different ways of thought I was exposed to, made me a better person. I wish others had the same experience but I feel it was far too rare.