The Confession (6 page)

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
Playboy
s 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 wanted 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
Playboy
s 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.

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 just 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.

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.