sign featuring a nude female corpse dangling from a lamppost. In the Cav Daily, another student wrote, “People are now tired of the rape issue coming up time and again in the news. Well, I’m tired, too; more than you could ever fathom.” She had been raped, she wrote, six weeks before. That year, UVA’s president, Frank Hereford, sent a letter to a Virginia delegate assuring him that there was no rape problem on campus. He provided ten pieces of evidence that the school was being proactive. Number six was that the student council sold women “alarm devices” at “well below cost.” Number nine was that women were locked inside their dorms at midnight.
During this period, UVA’s default assumption of male dominion over women became more strident in response to the rise of two student demographic groups that inherently challenged this idea: women and gay men. In 1972, the Cav Daily ran a disgusted “humor piece” envisioning a sissy new fraternity called Gamma Alpha Yepsilon, or GAY. The same year as the “rape city” report, the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority passed a ruling “prohibiting homosexuals from alcohol-serving restaurants,” and UVA used the rule to bar gay people from a pavilion on the Lawn. Hereford, as president, attempted to remove a student named Bob Elkins from his RA position because he was a “professed homosexual.” In 1990, a student publication ran a satire piece called “Great to Be Straight,” laying out a schedule for a week of heterosexual pride and celebration that included a “Take Back the Bathrooms” march. When I went to football games in college, people would sing UVA’s “The Good Old Song,” to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,” after every touchdown. After the line “We come from old Virgin-i-a, where all is bright and gay,” a huge portion of the crowd always screamed “Not gay!”
In the nineties, student conversation started to sharpen around the role that fraternities—a source of violence against women, against gay men, and against their own members—played in the prevalence of sexual assault at UVA. “The only first-week social option is attending Rugby Road fraternity parties,” wrote a Cav Daily editor in 1992. “Intimidating for some and dangerous for others, the Rugby option is simply not an adequate answer to initial social needs of first-year students.” That same year, at Pi Lambda Phi, another UVA fraternity, an eighteen-year-old woman was trapped in a storage room, pinned down on a mattress, raped, and beaten.
In his 2009 history of white fraternities, The Company He Keeps, Nicholas Syrett writes, “Fraternities attract men who value other men more than women. The intimacy that develops within fraternal circles between men who care for each other necessitates a vigorous performance of heterosexuality in order to combat the appearance of homosexuality.” (The chair of the UVA women’s studies department gave a similar statement after the 1992 rape at Pi Lamb: “Fraternities and sororities reinforce the subordinate position that women hold in general,” she said. “Men experience a sense of male identity by abusing women and hazing each other.”) Syrett writes that fraternity men prove their heterosexuality through “aggressive homophobia and the denigration of women”—through using homoerotic hazing rituals to humiliate one another, and through framing sex with women as something engaged in “for one’s brothers, for communal consumption by them.”
White fraternities have historically existed for the purpose of solidifying elite male power and entitlement. In the nineteenth century, wealthy men separated themselves from their poorer classmates through the frat system. In the twentieth century, men used frat houses to preserve an exclusively male space in an “increasingly mixed-gender world,” Syrett writes. As the idealism of the earliest frats was subsumed, in the twentieth century, by a changing idea of masculinity that increasingly allowed high-class status and low-class behavior to coexist in a single individual, fraternity members “used their status as self-proclaimed gentlemen to justify their less-savory antics….In performing gentlemanliness in public, they justified their existence. What they did behind closed doors was then supposed to be their business alone.”
Universities have a tendency to overlook fraternity violence in part because fraternities are a significant source of institutional capital. Frats funnel enormous amounts of alumni money back toward universities, and free them from the obligation to provide housing for their most privileged students. In return, frats enjoy a built-in leeway. Boys who join frats today are mostly conscious of wanting good parties, funny friends, hot girls around every weekend. Underneath this lies the thrill of group immunity, of being