The Confession

by James E. McGreevey

  Carried shame is a bad thing in itself, but Mellody believes that in some people it can create an acute childhood trauma. The symptoms of this are many, including emotional immaturity, an inability to achieve intimacy, a dogged feeling of unworthiness, and a spiritual freefall—descriptions of my life to a tee.

  My second shame concerned inauthenticity—a term that describes what happens when you’re dishonest about who you really are. In theory or practice, nobody was more duplicitous than I. Through most of my adult life there was not one person who knew who I really was, and the longer I went without amending that dishonesty, the more ashamed I felt.

  A third shame, for me, concerned my behavior. From the time in high school when I made up my mind to behave in public as though I were straight, I nonetheless carried on sexually with men. Scores of men.

  After Brian Fitzgerald at the YMCA pool, the rest were exclusively furtive encounters, mostly in seedy bookstores or public parks. Admitting this now provokes that shame all over again, but I know that I must disclose it as part of my healing journey—to free myself from the compulsion that caused me to behave that way in the first place. I was promiscuous and sexually active in ways I consider immoral and ugly. And I justified this by telling myself that I had no other choice, that my sexual urges were irrepressible, but as long as I remained in the closet I couldn’t enjoy an honest and beautiful love with a man—the kind of love that goes on vacations, outfits a home together, sits side by side in church; the kind of love that can lead to a broken heart, like the one that killed my grandfather. I craved love, but sex was all that was available to me.

  I should add that I was plagued by this third shame even when I wasn’t having sex, because in my heart I wanted it so badly I might as well have been guilty. When I first left home for Catholic University, for example, I attached myself to an upperclassman I’ll call Liam as zealously as I’d befriended Sean Hughes in high school. Like Sean, Liam was handsome, rugged, Irish American, and straight—with a gorgeous girlfriend to boot. The fact that he had a girlfriend made a difference; otherwise, I don’t think I could have expressed my affection for him as openly as I did. Not that I ever said a word about it, of course. Instead I merely followed him everywhere. In my wallet I secretly carried a picture of him, broad and angular in a cable-knit sweater. I found excuses to study in his room, in the same dorm as mine. And one early spring evening I pretended to fall asleep on his bed. Shrugging, he tucked in next to me, and we lay side by side through the night, like brothers. My arm fell over his shoulder.

  I was way too far in the closet to imagine this friendship turning to sex, even if Liam hadn’t been straight. It was thrilling just to have the physical proximity, a thrill that felt a lot like love. To this day I remember what the sun looked like the next morning, and can still hear the sound of the dried leaves beneath my heels as I bounded down the steps of Gibbons Hall, filled with the promises of life.

  Thereafter, we slept together platonically from time to time. Naturally, this started people talking, wondering out loud whether “McGreevey is a homo.” Somehow the speculation never extended to Liam; he was a skirt chaser, not the smarmy sort but a man who demonstrably loved women. Once, he told me, people started gossiping about me in his presence, and he stood up for me. “My answer was, he’s not hetero, he’s not homo, he’s just McGreevey,” he said. Being called sexless should have bothered me, I guess, but it didn’t.

  Of all the people in my life to that point, no one had ever accepted me more fully than Liam. But he did ask me once if I was gay. No one had ever put the question to me so bluntly. I’m ashamed to admit I couldn’t say yes, but I didn’t lie either. Instead I said, “That’s crazy,” and left it at that. Sometimes I think that if I’d been able to respond differently—if I had just said yes—in that moment my whole life might have pivoted in a new and healthier direction.

  Instead, after I transferred to Columbia, I developed another very close friendship, this one with a student from Sayville, Long Island, named Hugh Hackett, a runner with black hair and unforgettable blue eyes. Hugh was also Irish American, physically fit, and straight. His girlfriend was always around, and I became very close to her too. This was a pattern I would repeat throughout my life—making myself the third wheel, I think, was a way for me to develop emotional intimacy with a man while my friendship with his wife or girlfriend locked out any presumption that it would ever grow physical.

  Maybe it was because I was getting older—by now I was nineteen—but my sexual interests only grew more urgent after I moved to New York. Still, I never allowed myself to fantasize any sort of gay life, perhaps because of that toxic “carried shame.” I knew by now that other people my age were able to come out. In fact, there was a gay students’ group at Columbia at the very time I was there. But I would never have attended their meetings or dances or read any of their literature—that’s how frightened I was.

  New York City was also home to a burgeoning gay community, but I only once wandered down to Christopher Street, its epicenter. On that wintry evening, I looked in the window of a gay bar and was astonished at what I saw: a crowd of happy customers, all of them dressed in western wear, leather chaps, and work shirts. I longed for the life they had in there, but then I was somehow seized with the notion that the doorway to the bar was a tunnel with no egress, that if I crossed that threshold I would be abandoning everything I cherished. Rather than going in, I walked a hundred blocks back to the Columbia campus and vowed never to go down there again.

  I did befriend one gay person on campus, and I was impressed by how normal he seemed. Whether or not he knew it, though, behind his back he drew pointed comments from some of his housemates. He was considered a good guy, but exotic; I once heard a mutual straight friend make derogatory remarks about him, and I’m sure he wasn’t the only one. I was oversensitive about how he was treated, so much so that I was never able to see him as a role model. The model I chose was more exotic still: Mr. Spock, from Star Trek. After my affair with Brian Fitzgerald, I remember very earnestly watching the show and thinking, The Vulcans have sex every seven years. In between, they supplant all physical and emotional desires with steely intellectual rigor. I can do that. I tried containing my attraction to Hugh Hackett. Sometimes I even flirted with his girlfriend as a distraction. I remember riding the subway downtown with the two of them, her head in my lap and her feet in his. Our flirtatiousness seemed emotionally dangerous, but in the eighteen months I spent at Columbia before graduating, thankfully nothing came between us.

  At Christmas break in 1978, I said good-bye to them and took a subway downtown to catch a bus for Carteret. At Forty-second Street, I got out of the subway and headed for the Port Authority bus terminal through the flesh markets of Times Square. This was before its recent Disney-backed makeover; barkers were still openly luring customers off the street for strip shows, and young girls and old ladies could sometimes be seen plying their trade in doorways. Suddenly I was seized by curiosity—and, I’m sure, need. With time to kill, I ducked into one establishment. The lighting was awful and the place smelled of Lysol. Watching the flow of customers, almost all of whom were men, I could see the place was divided between gay and straight entertainments. I followed my instincts to the gay section. There, at the end of an aisle, I spotted a guy a year or two older than I was. I followed him into a small booth in the back of the shop, where movies were playing on a small coin-op screen.

  He took off most of his clothes and knelt down before me. There was nothing enjoyable about it—it was more mechanical than anything. I wasn’t even attracted to him. What I felt immediately was both relief and burden—I felt both better and worse. The thing about teenage sexuality is that it is explosive and demanding; any venting of it has a lance-the-boil quality. That goes ten times for a young gay man in the closet. The fever goes away instantly, but at the same time you’re plunged into a chaos, until you feel even worse off than before. That’s the third shame: You can’t believe you’ve done
this thing you swore never to do, this thing that makes you so reviled. My head was swimming with all of this as I prepared to make a hasty exit. I couldn’t believe I’d allowed myself to get in this position. I even displaced some of my anger onto my partner in this encounter, as though it were something he did, not something I did, that made me feel so loathsome.

  I’m not sure whether the guy picked up on this, but I was surprised when he demanded money from me. I refused. Making a scene, he followed me to the street; when I rejected him again he punched me in the eye, drawing a stream of blood. I pushed him to the ground and sprinted to my bus. Riding home with a rag pressed to my forehead, I thought back to the time my mother had comforted me for a similar injury. And these words actually came to mind: Okay, I’d better have seven years of Vulcan reprieve coming to me before having to deal with this again.

  No chance. Instead of reducing my urges, I gradually grew less inhibited about frequenting these anonymous outlets. I visited similar bookstores and shops in New York and New Jersey and continued having sex in the small booths there until I became too famous to risk discovery.

  THE ONLY PLACE WHERE I HAD EVER FOUND ANY REAL PLEASURE in these encounters was in Washington, during my law school years. At the juncture of Sixth and I Street, just around the corner from the federal and local courthouses of Judiciary Square, stood an abandoned synagogue. The once-magnificent structure, with its beautiful stained-glass Star of David over a bay of once-handsome doors, was now secured with chains and padlocks. Its windows were boarded up, its steps now strewn with litter.

  Between the synagogue and the building next door was a narrow alley that led to the parking lot and the long-forgotten gardens behind the temple. Every night, rain or shine, this hidden pocket of Washington filled with men just like me—some older, some even younger, but almost all of them wearing business suits and, on most of their left hands, proof that they’d made the same compromises I had. This was no gay bar with its Village People counterculture, no Times Square with its desperation and prostitution. We were the power brokers and backroom operatives and future leaders of America. We just happened to be gay.

  Well, not gay, exactly. In the abbreviated conversation that passed as dialogue between us, no one back behind the synagogue ever described himself that way to me. Long before the African American community coined the term to describe a world of men who mostly pass as straight but sneak sex with other men, we were on the down low—as men of all races have been for hundreds of years.

  Discovering the synagogue in 1979 was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my time in DC. Though it was less than half a mile from the Capitol and the Supreme Court, for some reason the cops never went near the place. I felt as though I’d come upon a sanctuary at last—it was a churchlike, almost spiritual, place. Moonlight squinted through the stained-glass windows into our garden, catching an inviting eye or a face stretched in ecstasy. The sound and choreography of the place were as mysterious and soothing to me as the Latin Mass, and I studied it intently. The crowd maneuvered constantly, and wordlessly, in response to the flux of new arrivals. A murmur in one quarter could touch off a moaning chorus in another.

  Shortly, I learned the ways to know who to approach and whose advance to wait for, when to move quickly, which posture said no thanks and which said please.

  These situations, for me, were always sinful and unhealthy. But in this one setting I felt comfortable. It was the only place I’d ever found where I wasn’t unique, where I was just one of many, where my carried shame didn’t follow me. With that gone, I could finally enjoy the company of other men like me, even if only in this compartmentalized manner. I looked forward to my visits there, sometimes two or three a week. These men had made the same decisions I had made, they lived the life I expected to inherit, and among them I felt safe. Every time I left there I felt more integrated, more authentic, less full of shame.

  One evening, as I stood on one of the metal platforms back there, a word came to me: liberated. Standing there in full sight of this group of men, I’d finally found a way to show who I was. I am finally free, I told myself. When of course I was just in a bigger cage.

  AS I GOT OLDER, MY SEXUAL EXPRESSIONS BECAME EVEN MORE baroque. I began lurking around Parkway rest stops, exchanging false names and intimacies with strangers. I met every conceivable type this way: bikers, executives, blue-collar workers, old and young, every shade of race. In every instance I recall, the men were kind to me. But there never was an emotional meaning to these encounters, even the few that were repeat engagements. Sometimes I would look around for one familiar face or another, or even suggest my schedule to someone and hope he’d return to find me. Even if he did return at the appointed time, it just didn’t matter. Besides carnality, there was no meaning whatsoever to these trysts, and they always left me cold.

  One night, I was finally caught. I had pulled into the stop following one of those political dinners in North Jersey. I was in a hurry for some reason. After parking, I flashed my headlights, giving the signal that I was available. No other headlamps fired back at me. I flashed mine again and again, to no avail.

  Glancing at my rearview mirror, I could see a state trooper approaching. I couldn’t have been more frightened. With my heart in my throat, I tried convincing him I was innocent of the scene he and I both knew was flagrant around us. You could tell he wasn’t buying it. Certain that he was thinking of writing me a summons for loitering, which would have been disastrous, I made a calculated decision to show him the prosecutor’s badge I’d received as a tradition upon my resignation a number of years back. I suppose I wanted to make him believe I was there on some sort of undercover operation. This was ridiculous, of course, and really stupid. It took him just a few minutes to radio my information to headquarters to learn who I was, and who I wasn’t.

  When he returned to my car, he handed me back my badge. “I never want to see you here again,” he said angrily. Mercifully he didn’t give me a summons, which would have created a record.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied, pulling slowly out of the parking area. I couldn’t believe how close to political peril I’d been. I vowed never to do anything like this again.

  But you already know how well that worked out.

  III.

  How One Lives in Shame

  8.

  HOW DO YOU LIVE WITH SUCH SHAME? HOW DO YOU ACCOMMODATE your own disappointments, your own revulsion with who you have become? How do you get out of bed in the morning feeling as bad as I did—or kiss your mother hello or say a prayer in church—when your self-respect has vanished? How can you carry on such an inauthentic life?

  You do it by splitting in two. You rescue at least part of yourself, the half that stands for tradition and values and America, the part that looks like the family you came from, the part that is acceptably true. And you walk away from the other half the way you would abandon something spoiled, something disgusting. This is a metaphorical amputation, because that other half doesn’t stop existing. You just take less and less responsibility for it, until it seems to take on a life of its own—to become something you merely observe. Something you alone can see. And when you’re on the other side, in the shrubbery or behind the synagogue, you no longer recognize your decent self. Years later I realized I’d become both Gene and Phineas from A Separate Peace: the soul and the body, the person who tumbled from the tree and the person who made him fall.

  Dostoevsky defined man as a creature who can get used to anything. Yes, but not without consequences. On both sides of this divide, my behavior began to take on something of a dreamlike hue. One side effect of this disconnect is that I have no detailed recollection of most of those encounters. My good friend Ray Lesniak, who has been a pillar of support for me since my troubles became public, thinks this makes perfect sense. “Your memory is spotty because you weren’t present in the moment,” he says. “Until you get into recovery, you’re not there in the first place—so there’s nothing to remember.” I quarant
ined those rejected histories in the other side of my brain. My truest identity was discarded there, too—the identity that involves the interplay between our hearts and our brains, the thing that makes each of us uniquely ourselves. When I made it my goal to rid myself of the desire, I was disavowing something else: my authentic self, my humanity.

  But desire doesn’t go away under this kind of pressure. It mutates. In my case it went from the simple passions of a young adult—for physical and romantic love and happiness—to a particularly rank, unfulfilling variety of lust. I felt it get ranker and less fulfilling with each passing year. Every step down I took, the farther I knew I would have to climb back up. I craved the normal things about love—I wanted to kiss, I ached for a hug, I dreamed of sharing a life with someone I loved, some man I loved. I used to make long lists of guys I had crushes on, scribbling their names like a teenager.

  But I never allowed my conquests to be anything like that. As glorious and meaningful as it would have been to have a loving and sound sexual experience with another man, I knew that I’d have to undo my happiness step by step as I began to chase my dream of a public career and the kind of “acceptable” life that went with it.

  So instead I settled for the detached anonymity of bookstores and rest stops—a compromise, but one that was wholly unfulfilling and morally unsatisfactory.