When Paul Mercurio first approached Aaron Goldsmith last summer about restarting Syracuse’s Delta Lambda Phi chapter, Goldsmith wasn’t crazy about the idea.

Goldsmith had already passed on the concept of rushing a social fraternity when he was a freshman. He had other commitments scattered across the SU campus.

Goldsmith told Mercurio he’d think about it.

“I looked at all my other time commitments and there was a lot of them,” Goldsmith said. “But I figured it’s worth a shot. And even if I had to pull out, at least I could get other people involved in it to carry it on, with or without me.”

Goldsmith came into his fall semester of his junior year only having a vision. He had no other members and no real foundation. But he did have Mercurio, a former graduate student at SU, who started the school’s original Delta Lambda Phi chapter in 2003, only to see it collapse due to lack of recruitment after just nine pledge classes.

DLP — a gay, bisexual and progressive male fraternity — had once been a staple at Syracuse, and it was Mercurio that tasked Goldsmith with leading a recolonizing effort that has now taken almost a full year.

Mercurio said he didn’t choose Goldsmith for any particular reason, but thinks he’s the right person for the job.

“You don’t need some sort of preordained prophecy,” Mercurio said. “Anybody could be this person, it’s just the fact that he stepped up.”

After graduating from Boston University, Mercurio came to the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in 2003 as a graduate student. He had gone to the LGBT Resource Center to try and gauge interest in Delta Lambda Phi.

He didn’t make a PowerPoint slide show or a grand presentation. He just passed around a signup sheet.

“I just went to the Pride Union thing,” Mercurio recalled. ”I said ‘Hey, this is me, this is what I’m about, this is the fraternity and it’s a good time.’”

But what started out as a safe haven and a brotherhood for gay men wanting to find a comfort zone within the greek community quickly disintegrated. The five members of the Alpha class graduated, and those remaining weren’t willing to put the time and the effort into getting more to join.

By the time the chapter closed down after its ninth pledge class, there was just a small handful of members left.

“Some of the people that were remaining weren’t very interested in rushing and getting new brothers,” Mercurio said. “You’ve got such a great brotherhood, that sometimes you forget the brotherhood needs to be perpetuated.”

Mercurio said it was extremely difficult to watch the chapter he started go through what it did. He had been a part of a thriving group at BU, and despite his best efforts to get the SU chapter to keep recruiting kids, it eventually lost its charter.

But he’s taken a backseat to the new founding fathers. It was his idea, but it’s become their venture.

One of those new members, Ivan Rosales, said he looked to join DLP when he first got to campus thinking it was active. He was disappointed to learn it had closed down years before.

So when the LGBT listserv sent out an email about the startup, he didn’t hesitate.

“It reminded me of when I originally wanted to be a part of it, coming in my freshman year,” Rosales said. ”I decided to give it a go.”

A group began to form. What started out as just Goldsmith has now grown to 10 people. He, along with Adam Magill and Goldsmith’s honors fraternity little Myles Chalue, made up the original executive board, and started interviewing people that responded to their advertisements.

The three of them lined up behind a desk and asked questions to each potential new member. It wasn’t an interrogation, though. It was a conversation. They wanted to find people that had a vision preventing the fraternity from repeating its own history.

In the end, they took most of the applicants, but not all of them.

“We’re not looking for people who are just looking to party,” Goldsmith said. “We’re looking for people who are invested in the organization, who will actually be a part of it.”

Magill said the only way that DLP won’t get its charter back at SU is if the students somehow do something wrong. Everyone, he said, including DLP’s national headquarters, the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Affairs and the LGBT Resource Center, is in support of having Syracuse become the 31st chartered DLP chapter.

The group’s executive board has been meeting once a week, while the rest of the recruits come in for bi-weekly meetings. At first, their relationship was strictly professional, but now they’ve all become closer friends.

“It’s one of those things where it really has to start organically,” said Rob Lydick, director of communications at DLP national headquarters. “You really need to have a group of people interested at a university to bring this to life.

“I think that there already is a step in the right direction.”

There’s still a lot of work to be done. DLP Nationals requires that the group complete a petition detailing their plans for the chapter.

After that part of the process is done, a representative from the national headquarters will come down and decide whether to make them a colony — a title they would hold until being chartered in about three or four semesters.

“We want to have this brotherhood where 10 years down the road we can all come back together and we can all be like, ‘Remember that time in college when we decided to do this crazy thing and it ended up being one of the greatest things you’ve ever done,’” Magill said.

Although the LGBT Resource Center has been a good base for him to get to know people, Goldsmith said DLP could add a different dimension to the LGBT community at SU.

It’s not the typical social fraternity, and Goldsmith said it’ll be listed as a multi-cultural fraternity. He said he doesn’t want to force people to have to pass through during the Interfraternity Council rush events, especially if they have no interest.

But even if it isn’t listed as a social fraternity, it serves the same function. Goldsmith said he’s not worried about being pigeonholed as a “gay fraternity” because, in a sense, that’s exactly what it is.

“It is a gay fraternity, but it’s not just that,” Goldsmith said. “I want to move away from that stigma, but have it at its core.”

Just months ago, Goldsmith said he wasn’t even sure he wanted to be a part of an organization like this. Now he’s on the brink of being the chapter’s founding father by next semester.

And while Mercurio has taken in this process mostly from the sidelines, he has still given advice to Goldsmith whenever he’s needed it. He’s been through it before, and is excited to see it happening again.

In his attic, Mercurio has a box full of mementos from the last time the chapter existed. He said once it gets recolonized, he plans to share it with Goldsmith as a celebration.

For Mercurio, it’s all come full circle. For Goldsmith, it’s a legacy that he’ll always have.

Even though Goldsmith will only be at SU for another year, he hopes the brotherhood he’s creating will continue for years to come.

Published on March 3, 2014 at 2:16 am

Contact Sam: sblum@syr.edu | @SamBlum3