This year, in the middle of August, the screams of two thousand 18-year-old girls filled a football stadium as each one ripped open the envelope that would determine their fate. It might sound like a dystopian, Hunger Games-style reaping or ritual sacrifice—but this was actually something much more sinister.
This was sorority rush.
Bama rush, both the actual event and the annual TikTok spectacle, just ended last month. It’s been a social media fixture every summer since #BamaRushTok first went viral in 2021. As someone who went through sorority rush at Auburn, the other big Alabama school, these videos became an object of particular fascination for me. I couldn’t look away: the indistinguishable blondes and their copy/paste OOTDs, the thrumming masses of sorority members dancing to Panhellenic-approved music, the house doors opening to reveal a Dante’s inferno of screaming sisters and jazz hands.
I’d done my best to scrub my own rush experience from the internet and my mind. As a self-professed indie girl, English major/art minor, it had always just seemed like a branding mistake, a temporary lapse of judgement. But now, in the blue glow of RushTok, the memories returned to me.
With the benefit of [redacted] years of hindsight and the retroactive clarity of my own queerness, I wondered: Was sorority rush the straightest or the gayest thing I’ve ever done?
In pursuit of a final verdict, I’d like to enter the following into evidence:
EXHIBIT A: PREPARATIONS
It was the early-2010s, a time when everyone was saying “gay” but the overall vibe was intensely, oppressively straight. Hilary Duff’s moving “Don’t Say Gay” PSA had apparently not managed to sway the frat boys.
On my tour of Auburn, I’d met up with a current student, the daughter of a family friend. Her blonde ponytail swung like a pendulum as she sipped a vanilla latte. She was brochure-pretty in shades of pastel, wearing leggings and Greek letters—the uniform of every girl on campus. “You’ll love it here,” she said. “You’ll fit right in.”
Back home, I flipped through her Facebook albums. Every photo was taken in golden hour light. Every girl looked like a glossy carbon copy of her, with smiles like white picket fences. They looked so beautiful and happy. When I imagined myself among them, a shimmer of warmth and power pulsed through my body.
So, yes: I decided to rush because a pretty girl told me to. I thought it would be a fun diversion. That was my first mistake.
Before rush began, we were required to submit applications. Mine was slapdash at best. Unlike most of the other students, I did not have any family connections to Greek life. I’d always considered myself Southern, but when I told fellow freshmen I was from North Carolina, they called me a Yankee: “I mean, your state has the word North in it.”
I met my new roommates that first day: a petite Texan, an actual Alabama pageant queen who introduced herself as the Peanut Princess of Dothan Country, and a freckled Floridian who had brought along a 6-foot-long mounted bass and hung it above our kitchen cabinets. They seemed to be varying degrees of prepared for the experience, from novice to pageant-level professional, but all significantly more equipped than me.
“I’ve been collecting dresses all summer,” said the Peanut Princess, flipping through her color-coded closet as I watched from her bed. “What are you wearing for Pref Day?”
Panic struck my heart. I hadn’t even been aware there were particular types of dresses needed for particular days. I could not distinguish Alpha from Zeta. I didn’t know which sororities were the “good” ones and which to stay away from. I had no plan, no preferences, no recommendations. I figured I could ride on my charm and quick wit. How wrong I was.
Behind closed doors, before the PNMs (potential new members) arrived, the sororities projected each of our photos onto a large screen. Current members stood up to provide commentary on the girls they knew: where they went to high school, their extracurriculars, who they’d had sex with. Two thousand women teasing out the details of our sex lives with one another? In dark rooms, late at night, closely studying and discussing our faces and bodies? Undeniably erotic!
“Rush crush” was the term Active members used for when they fell in love with a PNM. They would stand up each night, after the parties were over, and pledge their undying devotion: “I would be so proud if this girl was wearing our letters. I want her to be my sister.” There’s an element to the rush process that is overtly romantic. You’re dressing up for each other, you’re interviewing each other, you’re vying for one another’s attention. You’re being wooed. In one of the Bama Rush TikToks, a sorority president is dressed up as Prince Charming, holding a glass slipper and batting her eyelashes at the viewing audience of PNMs.
In the weeks leading up to rush, I’d gotten a series of increasingly frantic emails from Jill, the Panhellenic recruitment advisor, with warnings and instructions.“The movies show recruitment parties swarming with guys,” Jill had emailed us. “But there WILL NOT be ANY men at these recruitment parties!” In fact, we weren’t even allowed to talk about them. During rush, discussion of the three Bs (booze, bars, boys) was strictly forbidden and, by extension, any discussion of dating. This really wasn’t a problem for me. Though I’d broken up with my hometown boyfriend the week before, he’d all but evaporated from my mind.
Instead, my thoughts were consumed by what two thousand pretty sorority girls would think about me.
EXHIBIT B: GIRL-FLIRTING
“It’s easy,” said a hometown friend who’d rushed at a different school the year prior. “It’s just girl-flirting.” She shrugged.
Girl-flirting? As if that were simple, the easiest thing in the world, and not terrifyingly high-stakes. I was suddenly aware that perhaps not everyone felt inexplicably nervous when her friends changed in front of her and didn’t stumble over her words every time she talked to the pretty girl in the grade above her.
The first official morning of rush, I woke up early and groped toward the shared kitchen for coffee under the giant fish. Caffeinated, I returned to my closet to select an outfit. At these rush parties, I would be performing for women’s attention. This felt different than my life back home, which, by default, was built around boys and men. “Going out” looks catered to the male gaze would not fly here. Instead, I imagined the women who would be looking at me, picking out outfits I thought would please them. I knew I was submitting myself to their critical eyes. Was there something hot about that, too? To be harshly judged and—maybe—found favorable?
I’d already made a misstep. During convocation, the informal rush kick-off event, I’d worn vintage Harley Davidson boots and blue mascara. My hair was Sun-In blonde. Somehow every other girl had gotten a memo about what to wear: a slight variation of the exact same outfit, which was an XL Comfort Colors t-shirt, Nike shorts, and pearls, with a full face of makeup. The homogeny was staggering. “You look…nice,” one of the other freshman girls said to me, looking me up and down. This was not a compliment.
Even in the early morning, the Alabama heat was otherworldly—as in, something from the underworld. Packs of hopeful PNMs fanned themselves on the bright lawn. It was an entire week full of looking at women: their clothes, their shiny hair, their soft lips. Rush seemed to almost invite the gay gaze. I’d never let myself ogle women like that before. But under the guise of competition and evaluation, though, it was suddenly permissible. When I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Anna’s tanlines or the particular way Marci lifted her hair off her damp neck, I could chalk it up to jealousy. Just sizing up the competition.
When it was finally time for the first party at the first sorority house, we lined up in the hallway outside the door. First, we heard a murmur. Then it grew to a roar. Inside, 140 members began to clap, yell, jump, and chant. That’s the memory seared into my mind more vividly than anything else: the noise. It was as if the gates of hell were opening up. It was the sound I imagined Scottish Highlanders made when charging into battle. It was anything but pretty.
When I stepped into each chapter room, it felt like being admitted into a secret clubhouse decorated by someone’s rich grandma. Sororities were archaic and heteronormative, yes. But they were also a place of illicit wonder, an all-girl fantasy world where women cultivate intimate relationships, hold every leadership position, and govern themselves. I imagined pink silks, kitten heels, pancake breakfasts, and pillow fights. The fact that my mental image pulled so blatantly from girl-on-girl porn tropes only highlights how foreign it felt to exist in a space outside of the male gaze.
The first round of parties was called Ice Water Teas, during which we would visit each of the 17 sororities. There was no alcohol. There wasn’t even any tea. First, we were greeted by the president and recruitment, then a party hostess, then another, then another. “So,” said a dozen pretty girls with unblinking smiles. “What does your dad do for work?”
Their balletic choreography was dizzying—a tactic called “bumping.” I’d be in the middle of answering the first girl (“Oh, he’s a marketing manager—” just in time to see her face fall) when a new hostess would swoop in and I’d have to start it all over again. My first and only experience with speed dating.
Turns out, I was just as bad at girl-flirting as I’d anticipated.
“Don’t only talk about the things you have done,” Jill had written to us. “Also, talk about your goals for college and life!” How could I represent myself accurately to this glossy, glistening pack of strangers when I wasn’t even sure what kind of girl I was? I was waiting for them to tell me, to make me solid with their approval and acceptance.
“Just be yourself,” Jill said. “Let them see what you have to offer!” I talked almost exclusively about the giant fish in my kitchen.
EXHIBIT C: PICK ME
Four grueling days of parties. Each morning, the list of sororities narrowed. The dark mark of rush was being “dropped.” You would show up just to learn that no sororities had preferenced you. For the non-Greek reader, let me translate: It’s like opening your Hinge after sending a ton of likes and having no matches. Except you can never date again. Once you’re out, you’re out forever.
The final day of rush was Bid Day. Frat guys tailgated like they were watching a sporting event—or scouting their prey. Even in the early morning, heat waves glittered off the pavement. We held our sealed envelopes up against the sun trying to make out the Greek letters inside. Finally, Jill counted down from 10.
Once we tore our letters open, we all rushed—literally—to the edges of the field, where each sorority stood with large decorated signs, waiting to welcome their new sisters with open arms. They hugged me and showered me with gifts and teary embraces. I had been chosen. Yet I felt a little bit of deflation. The chase is always the hottest part.
I was officially pledged to a sorority. Pledged. Even that word is romantic, possessive. I was paired with a “big sister,” a pretty brunette who texted me everyday. Then, we began a month-long new member education. This was the probation period. We were constantly monitored. They tracked our study hours, community service, and knowledge of chapter history. We learned we could be called to “Standards” for wearing our letters while drinking or going to class without “two of the three done” (hair, makeup, clothes). At my friend’s sorority, two girls were brought in for questioning after making out in front of a guy at a frat party. It was always in front of a guy.
Were there gay girls in these sororities? Statistically, yes. Anecdotally, absolutely. When I posted on Instagram asking for friends with sorority experiences to chime in, at least half of them are gay now—though, yes, that might also be a data pool bias. Most of these girls were still closeted back then, often even to themselves. The pressures to perform heteronormativity are even higher in sororities, especially at a conservative institution like Auburn. And yet, queerness is an inevitability when you have thousands of screaming girls within one square mile of one another. So the question isn’t if queerness existed there, but how it manifested.
Sororities are queer the same way religion is erotic: unintentionally and unrelentingly. When sexuality is repressed, it doesn’t go away, it just finds strange, sideways places to emerge: rush crushes, Cinderella cosplay, girl-flirting, pledging fidelity, the discipline. The rituals, especially.
EXHIBIT D: TIL DEATH DO US PART
Initiation was the top-secret final ritual, when new members take an oath to officially become sisters. In these rituals, girls pledge their fidelity and loyalty: We bind ourselves to one another. Secret knocks, cyphers, and handshakes. My roommates were technically not allowed to say anything about their rituals, but details slipped out. The petite Texan wore all-white to hers, like a bride. The Floridian heard a rumor that her sorority required initiates to drink a small amount of arsenic, a literal take on “til death do us part.” Another friend was picked up in a black SUV, blindfolded, and driven out to an abandoned barn in the middle of the night. She wouldn’t tell us what happened there, but when she returned, she was in possession of a brand-new red lace thong.
The whirlwind of rush week had ended, and now I was left with the bleak reality of what I’d signed up for. Something was not sitting right with me. I secretly made a pro/con list about officially joining the sorority I had gotten a bid from. On the Pros column: “sisterhood?” On the cons: everything else. I did not like being monitored or disciplined. I did not want to be told who or what I was allowed to be. The final straw was when they fined me for missing library hours. I might not be the perfect sorority girl, but I was an honors student for god’s sake!
I never made it to initiation. I texted my Big to tell her I was dropping out. She met me outside of my dorm, where I handed over a pile of swag and gifts and blankets with my letters on them. She looked at me with the kind of bitterness I’d only ever experienced during a breakup. When I walked back into my dorm room, I stood under The Fish feeling immense relief. Sure, maybe I still didn’t know what kind of girl I was—wouldn’t really discover it until decades later—but even then, at age 18, some subterranean self-knowledge told me: you won’t find out here.
THE VERDICT
So, given all this evidence: Was sorority rush the straightest or the gayest thing I’ve ever done? The answer has to be: both.
The experience of sorority rush is absolutely straight. It upholds heteronormative, patriarchal, and class-based systems of power. Membership is contingent on performing a very specific kind of femininity. If we understand queerness as being fundamentally about dismantling binaries and inherited hierarchies and choosing an expansive set of possibilities, then Greek life is unequivocally straight.
It wasn’t just a fun diversion, either. It did real damage. It implanted expectations about womanhood and gender performance that ruled my decisions for the next four years and beyond, even after dropping out. The experience disciplined me into being the “right kind of woman,” a definition that did not—could not—include queerness. Sometimes I fantasize about what my life would have been like if I hadn’t rushed, hadn’t organized my college life around that gravitational pull. If I’d hung out with queer folks in my English classes or at the art studio, would I have figured out I was gay earlier?
But with the benefit of hard-won self-knowledge, I can also revisit my rush experience and appreciate the absurdity of it: all the ways (ridiculous, sweet, sad) my queerness emerged before I knew to call it that. For a girl who didn’t yet know she was gay, sorority rush gave me permission to look and admire. It let me vie for women’s attention under the guise of girl-flirting. The magnetic draw I felt toward these all-women spaces—the intimacy of them—held an illicit magic that I would only recognize much later as desire.
Looking back now, at that long sweaty week of dressing for these girls, behaving for them, competing for their favor, longing for them to pick me? Well, it doesn’t sound much different than what queer dating feels like now. Though I dropped out of sorority life after rush, my fascination with that world has never left me. If anything, it has only grown in its mythic allure. I’m forever compelled by the rituals, mysticism, discipline, ecstasy, and sublimated eroticism that sorority culture holds.
Perhaps that’s why, in spite of it all, “sorority sisters” remains one of my top roleplay fantasies. ;)
