The Confession (11 page)

 

AS A LEGISLATIVE AIDE, I FOUND MY FIRST MONTHS ON THE JOB
exhilarating. I was assigned to be staff liaison to the Health and Human Services Committee, answering indirectly to Assemblyman Otlowski. I read everything I could find on public health, including briefings created by the National Conference of State Legislatures, the National Governors Association, and assorted advocacy groups.

With Otlowski's direction and Karcher's support, I helped spearhead new bills on Medicaid and nursing homes, advocacy work I had begun at the Catholic Lawyers Guild. Families who placed a loved one in a nursing home often depleted their savings before qualifying for Medicaid, but most homes considered Medicaid only partial payment; if the family couldn't make supplemental payments, the patient could be evicted even if the family hadn't a dime left in the bank. We changed that. Today, unless a nursing home is already overburdened with Medicaid beds, no patient can be
discharged simply because he or she has run out of money. We were pretty far ahead of other states in this regard.

At the Majority Office I also learned a lot about not offending people with my political ambitions—mostly by making clumsy mistakes, which is how most good lessons are learned. I can't imagine what I was thinking the day I wrote the local Chamber of Commerce leadership (and probably a dozen other groups) on Assembly stationery introducing myself and offering to visit their group and describe the workings of Trenton and the legislative process. It was pure hubris, with a side of naïveté: I was just a lowly staffer looking for a little self-promotion, offering to explain state politics as if I'd invented the concept.

Somehow a copy of one of my letters got back to Dick Coffee, the executive director of the Assembly Majority Office, who saw the opportunity for a wicked practical joke. After drawing up a fake letter back to my original addressees, he made a carbon copy and sent it to me. “We are sorry you were bothered by Mr. McGreevey's letter to your groups,” it said. “This was immature and inappropriate. Rest assured that with some workplace training and in-depth psychological counseling, he will learn his rightful place and once again become a productive member of our staff.”

Coffee was obviously goofing with me, but the prank made me mad anyway. I was just trying to open a dialogue with the community about what the Democratic Party was up to—the more knowledge, I thought, the better our chances to stay in power. What really bothered me, though, was the implication that I needed therapy. I guess it cut a little too close to home.

 

OF ALL THE POLITICAL EVENTS ON THE NEW JERSEY CALENDAR,
two are so important that no political aspirant would dare miss them. The first is the New Jersey State League of Municipalities conference in Atlantic City, a three-day affair that takes place every November. Nearly twenty thousand elected and appointed officials attend the festivities, making it the country's largest gathering of public officials. The agenda is packed with panels on storm-water regulations, economic development, and the like, but in my experience no one pays a bit of attention to them. It's really just a huge frat party.

I attended my first League conference in 1983, shortly after joining the Assembly Majority Office. I hitched a ride with my friend Chris Guidette, a former reporter who ran public relations for Karcher. Hard to imagine, but I'd never been to Atlantic City before. My family didn't consider it a “wholesome” place, and not without reason; even into the 1980s its reputation was less than sterling. Still, I decided to attend at the last minute, hopping in Chris's car in Trenton at about two in the morning for the long trip south. Neither of us had a hotel reservation, much less a change of clothes. We drove through the night in torrential rain, passing through the Pine Barrens, the largest tract of wilderness between Boston and Virginia—a parcel of 1.1 million acres of quiet forest in the middle of one of America's most populous states. I'd never seen the Barrens before. I remember being struck by how desolate they seemed, how out of place and still. I felt a shiver of loneliness as I stared out the window, my feet up on the dashboard, my head against the window.

The last few miles of the trip were lit by the casinos' bright lights, which rose over the highway like Vegas in the desert. We sped through the tired, depressed city and finally pulled up in front of the casinos, magnificent and inviting, in time to watch the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean.

Inside the Conference Hall, literally thousands of political operatives were congregated outside the seminars and hospitality rooms. I knew nobody. Chris and I hung out for a while, walking through the garishly decorated hotel lobbies and checking out a couple of presentations. But soon he attached himself to some other friends, leaving me to negotiate the event alone. With no hotel room to return to, I had nothing to do but wander through the ballrooms, picking at platters of food and striking up occasional conversations. But people weren't in the mood to talk policy.

As the day progressed, it slowly dawned on me that this event was, at base, a pickup function. Many of the attendees appeared to be politically involved, as I was, or ambitious young professionals from one of the many powerful state trade associations, lobbying groups, or industries, there to help oil the gears of government in their favor. But sex and politics are inexorably intermingled in New Jersey public life, and that weekend in Atlantic City is an annual tribute to the fact. All around me, pickups were taking place in plain sight. People would be talking about this event for weeks to
come—who got lucky, who came up short, and what everybody else thought about it.

This was a terrible place not to be straight. It was like being back at one of those parties in high school again, alone with my secret in a crowded room, unable to function. And so, just like I had in high school, I left the party and started walking.

As I paced the boardwalk, I fell into a deep funk. Anxiety growled in my stomach. It was evening now, and the casino lights were shining again, reflecting against the waves. I gave myself a stern talking-to.
It'll all be fine,
I told myself,
you'll find a way to navigate it all, just as you always have.
Still, I couldn't bring myself to turn around and head back to the convention.

Instead, I walked into an Irish pub on St. James Place. The bartender was a woman named Cathy Burke (we have since remained friends), and as I sat at her bar drinking pints of Guinness, I realized I'd finally found someone in Atlantic City I could have a conversation with. She must have sensed I was upset because she let me chew her ear off for hours, talking politics, poetry, and religion. She even offered to let me nap in a room upstairs, but I chose to wait out the night on a barstool. I was stockpiling my will, preparing myself to head back.

When I finally dragged myself from the stool, a brilliant sun had risen. I couldn't see a thing. The glare gave me a feeling of epiphany, and I walked back to the Convention Center sensing that I had somehow grown tougher. Now, at least, I knew the rules I was expected to follow. I knew I would have to lie for the rest of my life—and I knew I was capable of it. The knowledge gave me a terrible feeling of power.

 

BY EARLY 1985, TWO YEARS INTO MY JOB, I WAS BECOMING DISILLUSIONED
with how difficult it was to get anything done in the legislature. Most lawmakers were under intense pressure to bring money back to their districts, and as such they paid little attention to statewide or strictly policy-centered issues. Because of this lack of interest in affairs of state, true legislative power resides in the hands of the governor, giving New Jersey by far the strongest governorship in the nation. The state's constitution, adopted
in 1947, gives governors power to appoint the secretary of state, the state treasurer, and the state attorney general, as well as power over five hundred statewide offices, including each of the county prosecutors, every judge, agency head, and cabinet member. Governors have veto power over budget line items, and can issue decrees by executive order, a privilege shared by only nine other governors.

Politically, New Jersey is a swing state, one with a long centrist tradition. At this time Tom Kean, a moderate Republican, was governor, and he was poised for an easy reelection. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, was fractured and fighting itself bitterly, unable to unite behind a consensus candidate to take him on. It looked like the Assembly was going to remain stymied.

In February, I got an unexpected call from Chris Dietz, chairman of the state Parole Board, offering kind words for my work. The call came as a surprise: as staff to the Assembly Oversight Committee, we'd recently conducted a thorough review of the Parole Board recommending a series of specific improvements. The committee's judgment may have seemed partisan, coming as it did just before election time, but we had little choice in the timing or the content of our report. In truth it was an extremely balanced report, so much so that it probably disappointed some Democrats. But it did highlight some areas where improvements were desperately needed, including one proposal considered radical at the time—a recommendation that victims be allowed to testify before board hearings.

Dietz thanked me for our report, then asked if I would consider moving over to the Board as executive director. For a twenty-eight-year-old, it was an exciting opportunity: I'd be taking the helm of an important state agency, directing a budget of more than $7 million. I wanted to accept immediately. But first I went to Alan Karcher, my mentor, and asked his blessing, which he gave enthusiastically.

For the next two years, I got to lay the groundwork that allowed New Jersey to become one of the first states in the country to consider a victim's ongoing traumas when determining whether to parole a convict—a right the legislature ultimately enshrined into law. What we proved wasn't surprising—victims of crime find comfort and relief when they are included in
the decision-making process. In an op-ed of mine that appeared in the
New York Times
, I wrote that the system in all other states “pampers the accused while humiliating the accuser.” We found a way to do just the opposite.

I was proud of this accomplishment and excited by the national attention that came with it.
Good Morning America
invited me to debate the issue with famed criminal defense attorney Gerry Spence. It was heady stuff.

But then, just as I was going on live television, a terrifying thought occurred to me: as soon as my image was beamed across the country, it might well land on the TV screens of dozens of men who would recognize me from anonymous sexual encounters—any one of whom could surely stop my career cold if he revealed what he knew about me. I carried on, but I was quaking the whole time.

 

IN THE MONTHS OF INTROSPECTION AND COUNSELING I'VE HAD
since leaving the public sphere, I have learned that all my life I have suffered three distinct shames. The first is something that the psychotherapist Pia Mellody calls “carried shame,” an inherited burden from which everyone suffers in one form or another—like the concept of original sin, I suppose. In my case, what I was carrying was the burden of society's and the Church's disapprobation of my core self. Gay people are especially susceptible to this, Mellody says, but it's extremely common among people in general. “You are less than,” she explained to me. “You grow up convinced you are not worth anything because of this core truth about yourself.”

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.