The Confession

by James E. McGreevey

  I had no idea what these people were, but I never suspected that they were in any way connected to me. To me they seemed freakish, with their noisy flamboyance and cynicism, and I turned away from them in revulsion. Being gay never drew me toward anyone, not in those years; instead it pushed me away from people, even my sisters and parents. I used to lay awake in bed at night, praying feverishly to be delivered from whatever this gripping affliction might turn out to be. It felt almost exactly like loneliness, but with a kind of hopeless anguish mixed in. And despite my nightly prayers, it proved stubbornly intractable.

  I WAS ELEVEN YEARS OLD WHEN MY PARENTS SENT ME AWAY TO spend the summer before sixth grade at Boy Scout camp. This was my first chance to venture out of my all-Catholic universe, and I was both excited and a little scared. It was immediately clear that I was in over my head. The camp was filled with public schoolkids who were undisciplined and aggressively competitive; compared to my St. Joe’s peers, they seemed almost feral. I hadn’t realized until then how deeply the nuns had driven their fearful sense of order into our little minds.

  All day I tagged along behind the other kids my age, making myself helpful and cracking jokes, but it did me little good. The nuns had always put a premium on perseverance, so I kept at it as long as I could. At some point in the afternoon, though, I finally ran out of steam. I climbed into my sleeping bag early that night, when most of the kids were still shooting the bull around the campfire outside. Not a bad day on balance, I thought. Try again tomorrow.

  From my tent, though, I could still hear the guys talking. And as soon as I was out of sight, they turned to mocking me—using words I’d never heard before, at least not about myself. Fag. Homo. He’s a fag. We can tell he’s a fag, he doesn’t like girls. Queer. You can just tell he’s a queer motherfucker. A faggot.

  I shook, then cried, in my sleeping bag. Was I imagining things? I shook my head clear and lifted an ear into the air to take another reading, but the words were the same. Still, my disorientation was so thorough that I found myself questioning where they were coming from: were they really calling me those names, or were those voices in my own mind? Try as I might, I couldn’t be sure.

  As my mind raced on, I remember thinking that this could play out in one of two ways. If it was a hallucination, I would have to find a way to prevent it from ever happening again. I would have to walk through life like a blind man, touching the walls around me and sniffing the air for clues, using multiple senses to get my bearings where everyone else got by with one.

  If what I’d heard was true, on the other hand—if those boys really were calling me a faggot—then I was in even deeper trouble. Why? Because from where they were sitting, they must have known I could hear them. Their raised voices told me that they were presenting me with a challenge. I could either go out and confront them—and get my ass kicked for my trouble—or stay in the tent and seal my reputation as a sissy.

  Until this moment, I realize now, I had never put together the pieces of the puzzle about my own life. I can’t even swear that I knew, in the summer of 1968, exactly what a “fag” was. My only goal in camp had been to fit in, to win the respect of the other boys. I reviewed everything about how I had behaved that day to see where I went wrong. What could possibly have triggered their hatred?

  And then it came to me: that morning, in one of my fits of eagerness to please, I had seen another boy wrestling with his knapsack, and I’d stepped forward to help him take it off. It was an innocent gesture, the kind of thing that was encouraged at St. Joe’s. Camp, apparently, was a different story.

  How stupid, I thought. Stay within the lines, Jim. Don’t give them any more rope to hang you with.

  As I drifted off to sleep that night, I’d made my decision: I’d be one of the guys, be as strong and masculine as possible. And as soon as I got home from camp, I resolved, I’d find a girl and kiss her. The next morning, I threw back the screen on my pup tent, headed straight for the ringleader from the night before, and began a campaign to win him over. I was persistent. I kept him close, showed him that I could work harder, chop more wood, pursue more merit badges, and navigate the forest better than any other Scout. Through sheer willpower, I turned him from a name-calling enemy into a good friend. He never knew what hit him.

  IN THE SIXTH GRADE, DURING ONE OF MY SLEEPLESS NIGHTS, I discovered masturbation. And certain uncomfortable truths came slowly into focus.

  Not that I was yet attracted to boys or men, not initially. But I knew masturbation was disallowed by Church teaching, that it was a form of evil. After that first time I prayed to God to keep it from happening again, but no such luck. I prayed and relapsed, prayed and relapsed, into high school and beyond. This might be the story of any red-blooded boy, but I felt totally defeated by it. If anyone was able to master this drive, it should have been me. Yet I failed again and again.

  From the start, I knew I had to make a meaningful confession about this lapse, these lapses. But I wasn’t about to whisper something like this into the grille at St. Joe’s, where I was so intimately connected. Even though the priests had assured us that nothing we revealed would go beyond the confessional, how could I risk it? This was the first time I ever looked at a man of the cloth with suspicion.

  But confess I must, so I took my sins to St. Mark’s or St. Mary’s, Catholic churches around the corner from the YMCA in Rahway. I remember stealing into the confessional like a bandit, yanking the words out of my mouth like they were tied to fish hooks. The shame I felt when that unseen priest gave me penance has never been surpassed. Not even when, an evening or two later, I fell off the path to virtue once more.

  Months into this biblical struggle, the battleground changed entirely: for the first time an image swam into my mind at the critical moment…and it wasn’t Mary or Ellen or Elizabeth or Karen. Unfortunately, it was—I suppose I shouldn’t say his name. He was a year behind me in school. Cute, blonde, skinny—and I had a subtle feeling that he was communicating with me on a private frequency, that we understood each other, were the same. As a young gay kid you don’t realize you’re searching for your own kind, but you never tire of the hunt. I was thrilled to find him, to discover that I wasn’t alone in the world. And I wanted him. It’s not a sexual quest, or not entirely; it’s a journey home.

  A few weeks later I was thrilled to learn that my interest was reciprocated. We were walking home from school, reviewing the day’s highlights as we often did. When we passed his house, I was surprised when he invited me in. “My brother’s got a collection of Playboys,” he said. “Wanna see?”

  I was in eighth grade, he was in seventh. One thing led to another.

  If he had been a girl, I might be able to tell you how we tumbled through the afternoon, what her flesh looked like in the warm light, how she made me feel all grown up. But those details never seem innocent when you talk about two boys. I will say this: it was wonderful. I felt alive. But we didn’t kiss, as much as I wanted to; what is first base for straight kids is the last gate on the farthest pasture of gay sexual exploration. A kiss is too intimate, too loaded. I wouldn’t kiss a man till I was in my mid-forties, twice married, governor-elect of New Jersey, and an emotional mess.

  But after this boy and I finished examining the Playboys and one another, I went into a total terror spiral. I couldn’t get home soon enough. I ripped off my clothing and scrubbed him off my skin in a scalding shower—a ritual baptismal renewal. I prayed nonstop to be free of the damnation that flooded my soul. “I will never do this again,” I promised. “This is a sin, an evil thing. Have I completely lost my self-control?”

  I never gave myself a free pass, not this time or any time in the future. I think it was Voltaire who said, “Try it once, you’re a philosopher; try it twice, you’re a sodomite.” I despaired from the start. I cast around for explanations and excuses. And, for the first time, I looked outside myself for blame. Who is encouraging me to do this? I wondered. Am I being set up? By whom? Who is responsible? I wante
d to believe that all this was out of my hands, that it was something visited upon me by an outside force. I wanted to be blameless. I didn’t know then—nobody did—that the cause was simple biology, the effect nothing more than a boyhood crush. The only outside force I could imagine was Satan himself.

  Is Satan luring me down this road? Or is he merely awaiting me at the end? Either way, I was terrified.

  THAT YOUNG MAN AND HIS FAMILY MOVED AWAY FROM CARTERET very soon thereafter. But his departure didn’t erase our history, which gnawed at me. I chose not to confess what happened. Instead of taking this thing to church, I took it to the Woodbridge Township Library. These days, hundreds of books are available to help gay kids understand their journeys, studies that prove that homosexuality is hardwired and immutable and undeniably common in most corners of the animal kingdom. Back then, many local card catalogues didn’t even list “homosexuality.” They went from homo sapiens directly to homogeneous and homogenized. I had to go to “Sexuality, deviant” to learn about myself, and the collected works were few and frightening. Most entries were for medical periodicals with names like Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases or scientific textbooks like Homosexuality: Its Causes and Cure, Sexual Deviance & Sexual Deviants, and Sexuality and Homosexuality, whose subtitle was: “The Definitive Explanation of Human Sexuality, Normal and Abnormal.” I knew immediately where on that continuum I fell.

  If you haven’t experienced it, it may be hard to understand the sinking feeling most every gay boy or girl of my generation experienced upon coming across this section of the library. Perhaps it’s something like what a child might feel after discovering that her fluish symptoms are really the signs of a fatal illness. All I could do in response was to slam the drawer closed, terrified of being discovered, and leave the library immediately, steeped in hopelessness.

  Still, in the months that followed I would return many times to peer into that card catalogue, thumbing the cards with increasing resignation. On quiet afternoons when I was sure I wouldn’t be caught, I nervously trolled the stacks and pulled out the texts, reading them with sweaty hands. They did little for my state of mind. I learned that “oral regression” and “masochistic tension” had caused my “inversion.” I was certainly diseased; on this point there was professional unanimity. I was a “counterfeit-sex,” a “third-sex,” an “intermediate-sex” with no expectation for happiness. Here was Stanley F. Yolles, MD, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, part of the U.S. Public Health Service, saying: “With broadening parental understanding and more scientific research, hopefully, the chances that anyone’s child will become a victim of homosexuality will eventually decrease.” I was a scourge, a threat to society, something to be eradicated.

  I was thirteen years old when I realized this.

  I don’t remember crying. Rather, I set a course of self-deliverance. The literature said my desires could be contained, so that’s what I set about doing. I read how psychiatrists regularly prescribed exercises involving girlie magazines in an effort to heterosexualize their gay male patients, a practice then called “aversion therapy” or “conversion therapy.” I bought Playboys and practiced ejaculating while staring at the pictures. I locked myself away and vowed to fight this war till I won or it killed me. Certainly I would never speak a word about what happened between me and that boy. Instead I made new plans: I would make a fresh start, enroll in a parochial high school in another town. This is how small things become secrets, how the closet door is built.

  4.

  I ALWAYS FELT MASCULINE, MALE, APPROPRIATE. GENDER CRISIS was never part of what I was going through. In 1980, the term gender identity disorder (GID) was taken up by the American Psychiatric Association to describe young boys who persistently adopt girlish behaviors (and girls who do the reverse), and even today the term is sometimes used to diagnose gay kids’ discomfort in their own skin. But a more enlightened school of academics have shown that gender dysphoria is extremely common among all kids, regardless of their sexuality; they maintain—and I agree—that the category itself is wrongheaded, another way to categorize gayness as a pathology. A girl who favors baseball mitts over manicures is no more “disordered” than any boy on her Little League team.

  As a child, I never had much interest in baseball or football; not until I started swimming at the YMCA did I start to develop confidence in my physicality. But I never showed any tendency to favor my female side. Some people have since told me that my slenderness, or something about the way I carry myself, suggests a certain persuasion. I reject this outright. It irritates me when people think they can pick all gay guys and lesbians out of lineups, or when I hear someone say “Aha! I thought so” after finding out that someone they know is gay. Some of the most effeminate men I know are solidly heterosexual, inside and out. It should go without saying that gay men are just as equally diverse on the gender matrix. Same goes for women. Line up handsome Christine Todd Whitman, my predecessor, alongside glamorous Representative Tammy Baldwin, the only lesbian serving openly on Capitol Hill, and you’ll know what I mean.

  Frankly, I don’t think there’s anything out of the ordinary about me physically, anything that says “effeminate” in any way. When I came out publicly, some photo editors had a field day searching for pictures of me with a limp wrist or some other stereotypical gay signifier—as though, after decades in the public eye, they’d suddenly come across a trove of shots where I looked like a Cher impersonator. Such pictures don’t exist. Some people even used their home computers to create the images they wanted, grafting my head onto Carson Kressley’s body and transforming me into one of the Fab Five from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Some of that stuff was pretty funny, I’ll admit, but it just wasn’t me. The truth is, with my thick glasses and curly hair, I was anything but stylish. From childhood on, my dad reminds me, I “bordered on nerd.”

  One thing is true—there is something noticeable about the way I walk. But this is definitely a matter of nurture, not nature. When I was an eighteen-year-old freshman at Catholic University in Washington, I misjudged the time one evening and found myself locked inside the library after hours. I tossed my books out the window and called down for help, but the campus was empty—already evacuated for Easter recess. So I called an upperclassman I knew who was staying on campus over the break. Luckily, he answered and agreed to rescue me. When he showed up, I saw him meander toward my window with the wide-open face of a child at the circus. Later he explained he’d been smoking pot in his room when I called—something I wish I’d known at the time.

  “I need help,” I pleaded. “Can you call campus security?”

  He shrugged. “Why don’t you just jump?”

  “It’s too high,” I said. The window must have been about fifteen feet off the ground. It was the only one I could open.

  He stepped back to measure the distance himself. “I’d jump,” he said. I guess the window wasn’t as high as he was.

  Never one to shy away from a challenge, I stupidly slid myself onto the ledge, dangled from my hands as low as I could, then let go. When I hit the ground, both my ankles shattered. Today I’m able to jog daily and swim without pain, but I’m always reminded of that foolish jump by the stiff, slightly listing limp in my stride. And never again have I pushed my luck with closing time, in a library or anywhere else.

  THERE WERE ONLY TWO OCCASIONS DURING THESE YEARS WHEN I remember being physically afraid. The first time was the night at Scout camp when I overheard those campers ridiculing me around the campfire. The second incident came a few years later. In every school there is a bully. At St. Joe’s that title went to a kid named John, a tall, sturdy, brash, and menacing figure we all steered clear of as much as possible. John never needed a reason to turn against one of my classmates. “I’m gonna kick your ass,” he would threaten, and his promises were never idle.

  One afternoon in sixth grade, John’s attentions turned to me. I don’t remember what set him off, but it hardly mattered; it was j
ust my turn. “I’m taking you out, McGreevey,” he said, and he named the place and time, later in the week. I knew I was a goner. I spent the next few days in a blur of fright and resignation. That first night in bed, I imagined myself fighting back; the second night I knew it was futile; on the third night I prayed for my soul.

  But then the hour of my reckoning came—and nothing happened. Did he forget, I wondered? Had Sister Imelda stepped in to prevent the crime? Could he possibly have forgiven me? Pitied me? Forgotten me? I’ll never know. But I stayed anxious for weeks, wondering what I’d done to provoke the beating I never got. Ultimately, the whole episode only reinforced my belief that a spontaneous life was not possible for me—that from now on I would have to think through every single move I made, abbreviate myself one gesture at a time, measure every possible risk and consequence before acting.

  ARMED WITH MY NEW LESSONS, I ENTERED NINTH GRADE AT ST. JOSEPH HIGH School in Metuchen—another St. Joe’s for me, but this one run by the Brothers of the Sacred Heart as a top-notch preparatory school. This St. Joe’s was an all-boys school, but it was no place for roughnecks like John; here the emphasis was on academics and the tradition of service, and the only strongmen wore long cassocks. Among them was Brother Michael, a fanatical and passionate instructor in world history who inspired both fear and excellence in his students. One afternoon when he was late to class, pandemonium broke out in his classroom. As I stood by and watched, the rowdier kids started throwing anything they could get their hands on—chalk, then erasers, then books. Eventually some projectile struck the door with great force, cracking the glass and sending us boys back to our seats in dread.