Thankfully, when Brother Michael arrived, he didn’t notice the damage. Instead he launched right into a discussion of The Scarlet Pimpernel, our reading assignment. He called on Bill Thomas, one of my classmates, to report on the story of gallantry and adventure during the French Revolution. But Bill hadn’t read a word of the assignment; instead he made a valiant effort to appear prepared, concocting a fantastic narrative that had little to do with the novel at hand. Rather than call his bluff, though, Brother Michael lured him down the garden path with cunning questions, until Bill was caught up in an elaborate yarn in which French aristocrats were being shuttled across the English Channel on the backs of marine mammals. We were all trying desperately to contain our laughter. Not Brother. With each audacious new twist from Bill, he paced the room more furiously—until suddenly, just as his rage was cresting, he looked down and discovered the cracked windowpane.
“Who is responsible for this?” he bellowed. “Which one of you broke my window?” Nobody in the room dared breathe. The guilty boy bravely raised a hand, though there were plenty in the room who should have shared the responsibility. I remember watching Brother’s pectoral cross swing back and forth across his chest as he taught the kid a lesson, Catholic school style.
These were the last days of corporal punishment in American schools; perhaps it was already gone from most public classrooms, but at St. Joe’s it was still common, especially during freshman year. There was one short and stocky Brother the older boys called “Cannonball,” for reasons that were obvious to all. One day, for example, a towering freshman named Joe Mondoro accidentally dropped a piece of paper on the stairway when Cannonball was serving as stair monitor.
“Pick it up,” Cannonball said sternly.
Joe bent down begrudgingly. “Yeah,” he muttered.
Cannonball took offense. “Is that, ‘Yes, Brother?’” he snapped.
“Yeah,” Joe said.
“When I speak to you,” Cannonball intoned in his fiercely controlled voice, “you will respond ‘Yes, Brother,’ or ‘No, Brother.’ Is that clear?” And with that he lifted Joe, who must have been six feet tall and twice his weight, over his head and threw him through the plasterboard wall. The damage went unrepaired all semester, a reminder of the cost of insubordination.
At St. Joe’s, obedience was next to godliness.
I FINALLY FOUND A GIRL TO KISS. FOR THE SAKE OF THE STORY, I’ll call her Carla. It was the eighth grade, shortly after my first sexual encounter with a boy. She was a year younger, just like him, and just as attractive. All the boys paid her attention, but for some reason she was interested in me. I was hanging out with a bunch of Carteret kids one afternoon, and as we walked along the side of my house I leaned in and kissed her on the lips. With everybody watching, I had kissed a girl. There, I thought, that’s what it feels like to be normal.
She kissed back, just like they did on daytime television shows. What followed was an old-fashioned necking session in the creeping dusk of a tight-knit suburb, touching and kissing and performing—the kind of scene that unspools every minute all over America. The other kids seemed impressed.
Not me. Her kisses were arousing, but there was no passion. I knew I wasn’t attracted to her in that way, and I found the knowledge frustrating. Over and over I kissed Carla and touched her, searching for an organic reaction that never came. What is a kiss, actually? Why is it so different when planted on a newborn’s belly than on another adult’s forehead as you make love? With poor Carla, it was neither of these. Kissing her was like kissing an aunt. It wasn’t her fault. I liked her, and I liked the feeling of having another human being in my arms, holding and being held. But we just didn’t fit together. I suppose it’s the same for a straight actor who finds himself cast in a gay love scene: it might not bother him to kiss another man, but it doesn’t carry the same thrill as the real thing.
My heart had refused to obey my mind, and I was inconsolable.
YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED THAT MY MEMORIES APPEAR TO BE SHARPENING. It’s true: I am growing more attuned to them. In the months since I came out, with the help of psychiatrists, priests, friends, and family, I’ve been sorting through the wreckage of my history and putting things back on the shelves where they belong. I have bothered my many friends and relatives relentlessly, quizzing them on matters big and small. I’ve grown accustomed to the baffled look on their faces when we come across some episode I don’t recall: sometimes an entire embarrassing event, sometimes a story they told me just yesterday. Of course, many people have a hard time remembering everything about their lives, but apparently this is especially common among those who’ve spent decades in the closet before coming out.
As soon as I left office, I began consulting doctors to help me regain my emotional health; though they saw signs of everything from impulse control disorder to workaholism in my psychological profile, post-traumatic stress disorder is the most plausible culprit behind my memory lapses. In my case, the trauma went on for forty-seven years, and it was induced as much by me as by anyone else. I worked hard to ensure that I was accepted as part of the traditional family of America, building a fortress of artificial truths about myself, shoring up my own fractured identity with layers of what I considered typical adolescent and adult behavior. And I spent so much mental energy keeping track of these things that everything else fell into a chaos in my mind.
I know now why I did certain things, or didn’t do them. I know now, for example, that my intense friendships with other men, beginning in ninth grade, involved simple crushes—that’s why I ached in their presence, why I always felt slightly ill thinking about them. At the time, this felt like a kind of mental defect. I sometimes truly wondered if I’d lost my bearings. Now I know I was lovesick, that’s all, like Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain.
Can you imagine a straight kid going through school never recognizing the symptoms of love? How disorienting that would be?
My best friend from ninth grade on was a classmate I’ll call Sean Hughes. By senior year I was spending most afternoons with him, working on the yearbook, The Evergreen, where I made him sports editor just to spend more time around him. He was articulate, bright, athletic, and charismatic, and I craved his company. I thought of him as a bit of a role model for me, like Gene was to Phineas in A Separate Peace. But I couldn’t quite keep up with him. I’d study and do well in class, like him. I could articulate theorems and syllogisms. But he excelled physically, too, leaving me in the dust on the soccer field and lettering in basketball and golf besides. On top of that, I would never have that casual, relaxed way with people that Sean had. Or his selflessness, for that matter. He knew I had a special devotion to him—probably even knew it was a romantic crush—but he never showed me anything but uncomplicated friendship in return.
Because he lived a few towns away, I sometimes spent the night at Sean’s, or as much time as we could together at school. As much as I enjoyed his company, it had the confusing effect of making me feel terribly lonely. That happened a lot to me as a child, and into adulthood: even in huge, crowded rooms, even among intimate and loving friends, I could sometimes experience a devastating aloneness, cold and unnerving. I first noticed this during my visits with Sean—the closer we got the lonelier I felt. Only now does this feeling make sense to me. It was the consequence of denying my heart.
In sophomore year, I accompanied Sean to a neighborhood party. I don’t recall whose family was away, but the house immediately became a warren of teenage debauchery. Beer cans popped open, marijuana joints were lit. Unlike my peers, I had no taste for alcohol. To this day I don’t drink more than a few sips of wine on special occasions. And I never smoked a cigarette or tried drugs of any sort. I suppose that makes me unique among my generation of politicians, but drugs just never appealed to me. This probably had as much to do with my family heritage in law enforcement as it did with not wanting to spoil my future plans. Most of my friends hadn’t drawn so sharp a line in the sand, and for the most part I don�
��t think their youthful experiments did them lasting harm.
Sean was having a blast. Everybody was. Kids were making out everywhere, from the basement to the master bathroom upstairs, or else talking and laughing in small groups. But something about this party made me realize that I had nothing in common with them. Looking around me, I saw in their faces a simple joy that I felt would forever elude me.
Without saying good-bye, I left the party to walk around the neighborhood, taking in the fresh air. And I began to cry in a way I hadn’t before or since.
By now I knew a little more about homosexuality. Amazed to learn how fully it had been embraced by the ancient Greeks and Romans, I’d read Spartacus, with its magnificent love scene between Antonius and Crassus. I’d also read Oscar Wilde and D. H. Lawrence, and committed swaths of Brideshead Revisited to memory. I had heard of the gay life in Greenwich Village, just across the New York Harbor and visible from the tops of buildings in Carteret. Still, in all my reading I had never found evidence of two men falling in love simply, settling down, and pursuing a life together among their family and friends.
And more to the point, I knew there was not another person at that party, or in the rich landscape of Carteret, whose life was anything like mine. For all I knew, I was the only gay kid in my school, in my neighborhood, perhaps in the whole town—and the loneliness this realization gave me was insufferable. I felt totally let down by my faith. “What did I do?” I prayed to God. “I’ve been good. I’ve prayed. I’ve tried to live a spiritual life. I’ve tried to be of service to others.” No relief came. “What good can come out of this?” I pleaded. “Is this all an exercise in power? Did you make me gay as a way to humble me? Where is the relief, God? How do I find the way?”
Nothing. In those moments of suffering, I’ll admit, I resented God. I felt the grip of evil, and I was angry at God for that. Theologically, I felt completely lost, totally without hope.
And in that way that teenagers do, I came to the conclusion that my only reprieve would be suicide. I will not detail the intricacies of my thinking, except to say that I never found the courage even to do that. And thus my self-esteem was further pummeled.
FORTUNATELY, THERE WERE OTHER THINGS TO THINK ABOUT, POLITICS chief among them. Here again, though, I was an outcast: an Irish Catholic who took the side of Richard Nixon.
This was not a popular move in 1971. Catholics were natural Democrats to begin with, and they’d never forgiven Nixon for his fierce losing campaign against John Kennedy in 1960. And once Bobby Kennedy turned against the Vietnam War, Nixon wasn’t likely to get much leeway from the Catholic bloc—not in Carteret, anyway. That’s not to say that my town was antiwar; far from it. We were soldiers and law enforcement officials, or had family members who were. And we were anti-Communist to the core. More than that, we were Americans—in that eager way that first- and second-generation Americans tend to be. We answered our nation’s call. We closed ranks when necessary, and waved the flag as we sent our best and the brightest off to fight the Vietcong. Eight never made it back home to Carteret. Only with time, as the war dragged on and the body count grew, did we grow divided about the war.
Not in the McGreevey household, though. Dad’s views held sway, and they were the views of a marine. “Don’t give ground,” he would say. “Our troops need our support.” But one by one our neighbors became critical of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. I remember, as if it were yesterday, walking by the home of one our neighbors, Mrs. Kvidahl, one day in 1967 or 1968. Mrs. Kvidahl was no hippie or political radical, and there was no better Catholic I knew. That day, on the way to school, I noticed that she’d hung a poster of Bobby Kennedy in her garage. I remember turning to my friend Eddie and saying, “That’s interesting. Something is happening here.”
Where Mrs. Kvidahl led, others followed, and by the early 1970s slow revolution was taking hold in our sleepy blue-collar suburb. But nothing compared to the seismic explosion that took place when one of our parish priests went the way of peace. I’ll never forget the Sunday morning Mass when Father Murphy, in his melodic brogue, turned fiercely on Nixon after the Cambodia incursion. “The war,” he concluded, “is morally wrong.”
I was sitting with my family in our regular pew, and when he said these words I snapped around to look at my father, who as a church lector was standing beside the altar—at the elbow of the priest delivering the antiwar homily. Dad’s face turned to stone. His two most adored institutions, America and the Church, which had always seemed to be on the same side of any fight, were crashing into each other head on, and you could see the agony in his eyes. I don’t remember specifically what Dad spent the rest of that afternoon yelling about, but I remember the volume still. I wasn’t the only McGreevey groping my way through an identity crisis in those years.
In this case, Dad had no bigger defender than me. In debate class, I went out to the right of Nixon when he announced an end to incursions across the twentieth parallel, in October 1972. And I was heartened when Nixon dropped the ceasefire and pushed north again during the so-called Christmas Bombing, setting off twelve days of the most concentrated air strikes in world history, which led in turn to the withdrawal of American troops within weeks and the collapse of Saigon two years later. My father and I watched these events closely on television, studied each new development in the morning’s papers. It was a sober but also a thrilling time; only later, once Nixon’s lies were revealed, did I come to regret my precocious early stand.
My excessive conservatism during these years also put me even further out of step with my peers. Looking back, I think my rightward turn may have been an attempt to give purpose to my isolation, as if I were saying, What you see in me that’s different is really Republicanism, nothing more sinister than that. I acted proudly out of step, wearing ties long after they were no longer required at school and getting myself elected president of every wonky club there was, from science to German to school spirit. I was chairman of the Assembly Committee, managing editor of the newspaper, and the only kid to do four years in the debate club. I turned all my attentions to accumulating accomplishments.
I also began throwing myself into church affairs with the same energy I devoted to my schoolyard political campaigns. I even began flirting with the new charismatic movement in Catholicism, which had first blossomed in Pittsburgh in 1968 and was slowly spreading to other American cities. A group meeting in Edison welcomed me in, but I never became comfortable with the singing, dancing, clapping, and speaking in tongues. The Holy Spirit, when it entered me, told me to go back to St. Joe’s, get on my knees, and say my prayers, the way Catholics have been doing for two thousand years.
At St. Joe’s, even Brother Michael thought I had taken my conservatism too far. “You’re too extreme, Jimmy,” he told me. “Life isn’t black or white. You’ve got to be more balanced in your viewpoints.” He counseled me to be more forgiving of the hippies and “peaceniks” I disparaged. I didn’t take his advice; I was still too much of an absolutist. If Rome was against communism—as Bishop Fulton J. Sheen so eloquently established on his television show, Life Is Worth Living—then it must also be against Hanoi. The Church had handed me down this set of inflexible, God-given values, and I wasn’t about to give any leeway in return.
I KNOW I MUST BE COMING ACROSS AS AN EXTREMELY LONELY young man, but I did have many close friends—men and women alike, who remain instrumental in my life to this day. My high school years, in fact, were crowded with social obligations and opportunities. Nothing was more important to me than the time I spent at the YMCA in Rahway, an invigorating universe inside a blocky two-story brick building near the railroad tracks. The lessons I learned at the Y have stayed with me throughout my life: leadership and consensus, ecumenism and racial tolerance, and solid values, chiefly a belief in the value of social service.
I had been taking classes and swimming lessons there for years, but in the summer after freshman year the Y gave me my first job, as assistant camp counselor. The
work thrilled me. The “camp” was right there at the Y, a program of day-long activities for underprivileged kids from the area, some just a few years younger than I was. We helped organize ball games, crafts, and other recreations, as well as field trips. This was a lot of responsibility for us kids, and not without potential for disaster. One afternoon we took the campers into New York to visit the legendary Bronx Zoo. Each counselor was responsible for twelve or fourteen kids. One of the kids under my supervision was named Billy Wnuck. Unfortunately, his natural curiosity drew him to the crocodile ponds—literally. When I turned my back he climbed over the fence and bent down to pet one of those enormous creatures on the head. Our cries of alarm were enough to convince Billy to scoot back to safety in time.
Visiting these kids at their homes over on Hazelwood Avenue allowed me to see stark poverty for the first time. In one kid’s home, wooden boxes stood in for furniture, and layers of unhemmed fabric served as curtains. His ill grandmother was convalescing on a mattress on the floor. It was a scene that almost made me cry. Most of the kids at the Y camping program were there on scholarship. Often they came with no food in their stomachs and ill-fitting clothes on their backs. But there was always something to wear and eat there, and even extras to take home.
It was also a racial mixing bowl, where the color of one’s skin was so irrelevant as to go unremarked. I remember the first time Patty Cannon cornrowed my hair, how excited I was to show it to my sisters and to teach them the songs the children had taught me: “Hambone, Hambone, where you been?” I wore the braids all week, only taking them out in time for Sunday Mass.
At the Y, I felt I could be totally myself. I felt none of the sense of judgment that shadowed me at the church, or the burdens I felt at school. I also felt a little more “cool” at the Y, where I didn’t have to wear my goofy glasses. Even my vexingly curly hair straightened out after a swim, just the way I always wanted it.
The Confession Page 6