The Confession (12 page)

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.

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 quarantined 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.

There was also the constant fear of contracting HIV. Although I was extremely careful, I dreaded the disease. I knew only one person who came down with it, a friend of mine and Laura's from Catholic University. He never told anybody what he had, and died, tragically, in 1987. When we learned what had killed him, I was stunned. I guess I thought AIDS would never strike so close to home. Surely, I thought, his life can't have been any wilder than mine. So a week or so later I forced myself to take the test, anonymously, in a crowded STD clinic on the west side of Manhattan. It was a degrading and terrifying experience, though fortunately the news was good.

I tried to stop. Just as I had as a teenager, I desperately resumed my efforts to shift my sexual drive toward women, reading from books by
psychologists and psychiatrists who have since been discredited as quacks. I put tight controls on my sexual fantasies. I redoubled my prayers, adding new saints and rituals with each passing year. I meditated on the primary and secondary benefits of heterosexuality, as I saw them, and even put down on paper the future I could expect as a gay American (isolation, loss of family) versus my expectations as a straight American (boundless success, happiness, extended family). I stared at
Playboy
centerfolds as instructed, hoping for a breakthrough. Never mind that real women aren't airbrushed, depilated, and siliconed like those models. The prevailing theories held that such images could “correct” sexual drives that had been arrested in childhood and redirect them to the “proper” object. Today, the American Psychiatric Association concedes that “aversion therapy” and “conversion therapy” of this sort can do only damage. At the time, though, all I knew was that my behavior was getting crazier and crazier. With each new encounter, I was getting nearer and nearer to being caught—which surely would have generated headlines, especially after I became executive director of the New Jersey Parole Board.

I know how it happens that a man like Roy Cohn, the powerful lawyer and closeted aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy, builds a sex life around male prostitutes—or an entertainer like George Michael is one day dragged out of a public toilet in handcuffs. When you repress your simple expressions of love, other, less wholesome, forms emerge to take their place. I will always remember a particular line I read in a biography of Rock Hudson, who denied being gay until days before he died of AIDS in 1985. In the 1960s, at the height of his fame, Hudson was given the chance to make love with a man in Hollywood. “I'll put it this way,” the man said later, “he was
hungry.
” The closet starves a man, and when he gets a chance he gorges till it sickens him.

But he doesn't give up pretenses, and that's the story of my adult life. In public, I became as avid a womanizer as anybody else on the New Jersey political scene. My unconsummated “romance” with Laura ran its course; I even asked her to marry me, praying she would know I meant this to be an arrangement, and breathed a sign of relief when she declined. In her wake came a parade of other women. I went to bed with some of them, even romanced several at later League of Municipalities conferences, making sure
people saw us leaving or entering hotel rooms together. I suppose a few of those women might read this book. I'd like them to know that my interest in them was genuine. I appreciated their beauty and enjoyed holding them in my arms, especially in those earlier years. But my attraction was largely artificial, my sexual performance a triumph of mind over matter.

And it never totally did the job it was supposed to do. Rumors about me multiplied no matter what I did. I couldn't quite put my finger on where they were coming from. I sometimes worried that they were generated in my mind, the way I thought I'd imagined the Cub Scouts ridiculing me. But they were often reported to me by good friends, who were sure they weren't true but who worried that such talk might derail my career. There was one particularly persistent story that I had been caught being intimate with a man in a car in a cemetery, a story with no foundation in fact. To this day, I am sure there are people who think it was true.

The more the rumors circulated, the more public and brazen I became about my heterosexual conquests. I started checking out the strip clubs in Linden and Carteret with friends. It was amazing to me how often we ran into local political operatives and Wall Street traders in such places, mostly young-men-in-a-hurry types from working-class backgrounds. A great deal of New Jersey's networking is conducted by men while folding bills into the waistbands of women dancing in their laps at clubs with names like VIP and Cheeques. For aspiring politicians like me, these were our fraternal lodges—relaxed places to see and be seen, to blow off steam, and establish lasting and productive connections.

In our milieu, it wasn't enough to appear straight; you actually had to prove your mettle in public. I felt I had no choice but to engage the services of the women at the clubs, for show. There were times—scores of times—when I would invite friends to my apartment or hotel room when I knew I'd be in bed with a woman, just so that they'd “accidentally” catch me in the act.

Joe Suliga was one of those friends. Though he was entirely heterosexual, I saw a lot of myself in Joe. He was a gregarious and strappingly handsome kid from a working-class family in Linden, with an outsized drive to make a difference in the political realm. At the age of nineteen, he became the youngest person ever elected to the Linden Board of Education. After
college he served on the Linden town council. He planned to run for state senate one day; that was the job of his dreams. Joe was an idealist who believed in public service, and an unflagging optimist about human nature, the political system, and his own role in it. And he loved women as much as they loved him. We used to order beer after beer at Cheeques, watching the dancers twirl on their poles while debating everything from local policy initiatives and tax ratables to the merits of silicone breast enhancement.

On occasion, Joe and I used to go to one of the salty Jersey Shore towns that come to life in summer, searching for female companionship. We looked like total opposites on those outings. Everything about Joe screamed confidence and enthusiasm, from his Hawaiian shirts down to flip-flops; I, on the other hand, wore dark suits and a tie wherever I went. I'm not saying I wasn't successful at attracting women. I even enjoyed the hunt, despite the pressures to perform sexually. But I never forgot for a minute that I was in Joe's world, playing by his rules.

It may seem peculiar, but being able to date women that way gave me a feeling of great power. Where most people were stuck being just one thing all their lives, I thought, I'd found a way to overcome those limitations, to become whatever was necessary in the moment. I knew there was a difference between what I wanted and what I was allowed, between my heart and my actions, but it didn't stop me. I learned to study what moves worked and what didn't, practicing and perfecting my inauthenticity. Being divided this way was never comfortable, but I found a way to live with it. People actually believed I was straight, even my closest friends—even those women. Not me. I knew in every instance that the sex was a contortion of my desires.

Ironically, as I began to climb the ladder of electoral politics, it was this dividing experience that helped me thrive. Political compromises came easy to me because I'd learned how to keep a part of myself innocent of them. Politics, like dating, involved unhappy accommodations. Throughout it, I kept a steel wall around my moral and sexual instincts—protecting them, I thought, from the threats of the real world. This stand gave me a tremendous advantage in politics, if not in my soul. The more I engaged in
doing
rather than
being,
the more alienated I became from my spirituality. My relationship with God was never more remote.

In my longing for intimacy—the gift God gave man—I was marching slowly into hell.

 

IN 1985, PETER SHAPIRO, A COUNTY EXECUTIVE WITH LITTLE NAME
recognition but outstanding bona fides as a reformer, was chosen by the Democratic Party to take on Tom Kean. Shapiro's support came from the liberal wing of the party; I favored the more moderate John F. Russo, a Notre Dame and Columbia University Law School graduate and the president of the state senate. Russo seemed to understand the state's identity politics and working-class roots, having come from a family much like my own. He was also charismatic, having pulled together a vast political machine on the strength of his personality alone. Unfortunately, he was unable to raise the money to expand his campaign. The party pulled behind the better-funded candidate, and my man was out of the race.

It almost wouldn't have mattered. Kean's popularity was soaring, thanks to a budget surplus and a nationwide economic resurgence attributed—wrongly, in my view—to incumbent politicians. He credited his supply-side policies, though objectively the mid-eighties economic boom affected Democratic and Republican states alike. But New Jersey was undeniably in good shape, as even Kean's Democratic opponents admitted. More to the point, they were forced to admit that Kean was a good man and a good governor, the kind of centrist Republican that New Jersey is known for. An early environmentalist, Kean had always believed our state had an obligation to fight poverty and support the poor—policies that were anathema in Ronald Reagan's GOP.

But perhaps most impressive were Kean's feelings about race. He often spoke in African American churches and clubs, advocating for equal opportunity for all New Jerseyans. It wasn't just talk. He appointed a record number of blacks and Latinos to high-level state offices, including judgeships, because he believed that government should reflect the demographics of its citizens. No other governor, Democrat or Republican, made bigger strides toward a color-blind New Jersey.

Shapiro was never expected to win, but his campaign turned out to be
a disaster. He failed to stake out a single position against Kean. Even some Democratic leaders seemed to favor Kean—but they pressed forward anyway, out of party loyalty. That was my bind exactly. I voted for Shapiro, but I rooted for Kean.

When election night came, the results were atrocious. Many of the state's labor unions turned out for the Republican, costing us one of our bases. Even worse, more than 60 percent of African Americans crossed party lines as well. Kean's coattails carried dozens of senators and assemblymen to victory. The Democrats lost the majority in both chambers at the same time. We were trounced.

And although Kean and I got along well, my future in government looked bleak after his victory. As a Democrat, I couldn't expect to get much higher in Kean's administration than the Parole Board. Complicating matters, Kean decided not to reappoint my boss, Chris Dietz, replacing him with a former Ocean County Sheriff who shared little of Chris's progressive vision for inmate rehabilitation. I started looking for another job at once.