The Confession by James E. McGreevey Read Free Book Online Page B

all I knew for sure was that I would make myself the perfect altar boy, bringing pride to my clan. I literally recall hearing that word sing in my mind: perfect. And, having attained this remarkable high office, I wasn’t the first altar boy to behave in a cocky way, though I may have set new standards for self-assurance. When the bishop of Trenton, George Ahr, came to say Mass at our church, I remember feeling obliged to welcome him myself. “Your Eminence,” I said, extending my small hand, “I’m Jimmy McGreevey, a fourth-grader, an altar boy—one of the youngest—and a member of [this club and that] at St. Joe’s. I extend a warm welcome on behalf of myself and the other students.” The bishop was gracious, and we spoke for a number of minutes before I realized that the entire congregation had turned to look at us. I could see my grandmother mouthing to my father, “Look at Jimmy, he’s talking to the bishop.” Most Catholics were intimidated by such visits from high Church leaders, as my father recalls. “We all treated the bishop like he was a visitor from Heaven. You didn’t care. You’d be talking to anybody and everybody.”
    It’s no wonder my father used to call me “my little statesman.” From a very young age I saw myself as a leader, and when other kids were worrying about what to do with their summer vacations, I was already setting ridiculously outsized political goals for myself. I don’t remember this at all, but Jim Burns, who transferred to St. Joe’s from parochial school in Jersey City when we were both second- or third-graders, says I introduced myself to him on his first day as though I were the official ambassador to newcomers, adding: “I’m going to be secretary of state one day.” A few years later, I had the hubris to tell Mary DeLoretto, a gorgeous girl who palled around with me at the YMCA when we were teenagers, something similar: “One day I’m gonna marry you and be president of the United States.”
    And yet, even back then, I knew on some semiconscious level that I could never be president—or even have a wife, not properly. I didn’t yet know that I was gay, but I had that desperate sense that I was alone and destined to remain that way. I saw myself as apart from the wider world, and Ihad the feeling that others out there were secretly spying on me. I saw them watching me, and I saw myself being watched by them. I wanted to exist in the simple moment like everybody else, where I felt myself closest to God and embraced by my family, but that proved impossible to sustain. Scholars have described the “growing sense of distance…loneliness, and despair” that often characterizes the youth and adolescence of gay men and women. I felt all that and more, and it made me afraid.
    This feeling, commonly referred to as dissociation, is caused when a child pushes unwanted knowledge out of his mind. My gayness was an unsettling fact even before I learned the ugly vocabulary to describe it, even before it involved sexual impulses or the prolonged period of repression and explosion that inevitably follows.
    Lon Johnston and David Jenkins, two Texas professors of social work, have studied the childhood psychic damage commonly found among gay men and women who come out in later life:
    Adolescence is often known as a time of rebellion and self-discovery. Yet [for these subjects] acts of defiance and embracing their inner feelings were often curtailed during adolescence. Most participants indicated they rarely rebelled against their parents or other authority figures. Participants described intense pressure to guard the secret of their sexual orientation, and one way to guard this secret was to always be in control of their behavior. Being in control meant rarely doing anything that could raise questions in their parent(s)’ and/or friends’ minds about what might be going on