No, not hand grenades, but (portmanteaued) fag frats, sexually specialized college fraternities. A topic that sprung out of my Sundance interview posting, in a comment by Gijs Doorenbos:
F.A.G. fraternity -> ΦAΓ ? (Should be available as a T shirt somewhere)
And then we strolled down fraternity row.
My response:
— AZ: Lovely. No t-shirt currently exists; I’d have to have one custom-made. (Which I might do; my BIG FAG and FAGGOT shirts are too incendiary for me to wear where I live now.) But the fraternity has been created at least twice …
Phi Alpha Gamma 1: the performance work. From Dan Bernitt’s website, in his own words:
Dan Bernitt makes performance work that puts audiences inside systems of belief and asks how ordinary people, inside ordinary institutions, arrive at complicity, crisis, or collapse. His shows don’t explain these systems from the outside. They inhabit them, finding the internal logic that makes violence and self-destruction feel, for a moment, completely reasonable. That’s what makes them useful long after the curtain comes down.
His solo performances, including Yelling at Bananas in Whole Foods and Phi Alpha Gamma, have been presented at universities, festivals, and performance series throughout the United States and in Ireland. Phi Alpha Gamma enters the interior world of a college fraternity reckoning with homophobia. Yelling at Bananas in Whole Foods tracks how certainty curdles into isolation. Both have generated sustained conversation on campuses about masculinity and the cultures institutions build without meaning to.
Phi Alpha Gamma 2: a socially conscious fun frat, an inheritor of Stonewall. From a 3/21/91 newspaper story from Iowa State Univ.:
Phi Alpha Gamma, a new group at lowa State formed to increase the awareness of the gay community, will be commencing activities soon, said James Schaefer, one of the group’s founding members. The name of the group comes from the greek letters spelling “FAG,” according to Paragraph, the ISU Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual Alliance newsletter. The newsletter said the founders of the group wanted some way to make consciousness-raising a fun activity. Schaefer, who is also president of LGBA, said Phi Alpha Gamma in- tends to promote gay visibility on campus and have a good time doing it.
And while we’re on the subject, there’s the fictional frag, Sigma Epsilon Chi, which does have a t-shirt:
“That’s why we joined”
Sigma Epsilon Chi is a college fraternity featured in a long series of gay porn videos; you can hang practically anything gay-pornish on the hook of a frag.
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