The Confession (5 page)

And my efforts paid off: at the age of nine I was invited to be an altar boy, among the youngest at St. Joe's. The call came one morning in early winter, when the sun was still warm. Sister Mary Louis, a delightful Servite nun with a head cover tucked below her chin, approached me quietly. “Sister Imelda wishes to see you,” she said.
This can't be good,
I thought. I went to her office directly and stood nervously in the reception area of the school's administrative pod.

She looked up from her desk over the black rim of her glasses. Another nun stood behind her, regarding me cautiously. “Report to the church,” Sister Imelda said.

I wasn't expecting to be handed an altar boy's surplice that day, but when it happened I was overcome with pride. To be
selected
was a heady feeling. When I threaded myself into the floor-length robe and small white alb, I knew the promises of the Church were true: I was being summoned to serve as a kind of mini-Christ on Earth, and the realization was nearly too crushing to bear. In a dream I had not long thereafter, and again from time to time throughout my life, I saw myself facedown on the white marble rostrum, prostrate before God and the bishop towering above me, receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Tu es sacerdos in aeternun, secundum ordinem Melchizedek,
a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.

A priest forever
: the idea has attracted me from time to time throughout my life. As a young man I paged through seminary brochures and daydreamed about becoming “a man chosen and set apart,” as Pope John XXIII wrote, “and blessed in a very special way with heavenly gifts—a sharer in
divine power.” I ran my fingertips over the photographs of young students with books under their arms, the Church's future leaders kicking at the hems of their cassocks, and dreamed of a life of spirit-driven purpose.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Back then, 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 I
had 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:

I'm no social scientist, but I can assure you that this describes me perfectly. My entire personal identity was impeded during my childhood. My difference was a fact, not a theory, and it was something I could not
overcome. I didn't even know what homosexuality was; gayness has only been discussed politely for the past few decades, and when I was growing up the idea made only brief appearances, mostly in the punch lines of jokes. I never heard my mom or dad, or anyone else in our large family, utter a single negative word about gays—but then again, the subject never really came up at all, good or bad. In our world, homosexuality really didn't exist.

There were glimpses on television: Paul Lynde, Liberace, and Rip Taylor come to mind, and later Truman Capote and Renée Richards, the transgender tennis player. But for the most part these were presented as “characters,” outsized personalities, never explicitly acknowledged as gay. The figures themselves were as anxious as anyone to keep the subject out of public view; Liberace even took a journalist to court for calling him a “fruit flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother-love” (and he won!).

I had no idea what these people were, but I never suspected that they were in any way connected to me. To me they seemed freakish, with their noisy flamboyance and cynicism, and I turned away from them in revulsion. Being gay never drew me toward anyone, not in those years; instead it pushed me away from people, even my sisters and parents. I used to lay awake in bed at night, praying feverishly to be delivered from whatever this gripping affliction might turn out to be. It felt almost exactly like loneliness, but with a kind of hopeless anguish mixed in. And despite my nightly prayers, it proved stubbornly intractable.

 

I WAS ELEVEN YEARS OLD WHEN MY PARENTS SENT ME AWAY TO
spend the summer before sixth grade at Boy Scout camp. This was my first chance to venture out of my all-Catholic universe, and I was both excited and a little scared. It was immediately clear that I was in over my head. The camp was filled with public schoolkids who were undisciplined and aggressively competitive; compared to my St. Joe's peers, they seemed almost feral. I hadn't realized until then how deeply the nuns had driven their fearful sense of order into our little minds.

All day I tagged along behind the other kids my age, making myself helpful and cracking jokes, but it did me little good. The nuns had always
put a premium on perseverance, so I kept at it as long as I could. At some point in the afternoon, though, I finally ran out of steam. I climbed into my sleeping bag early that night, when most of the kids were still shooting the bull around the campfire outside.
Not a bad day on balance
, I thought.
Try again tomorrow.

From my tent, though, I could still hear the guys talking. And as soon as I was out of sight, they turned to mocking me—using words I'd never heard before, at least not about myself.
Fag. Homo. He's a fag. We can tell he's a fag, he doesn't like girls. Queer. You can just tell he's a queer motherfucker. A faggot.

I shook, then cried, in my sleeping bag. Was I imagining things? I shook my head clear and lifted an ear into the air to take another reading, but the words were the same. Still, my disorientation was so thorough that I found myself questioning where they were coming from: were they really calling me those names, or were those voices in my own mind? Try as I might, I couldn't be sure.

As my mind raced on, I remember thinking that this could play out in one of two ways. If it was a hallucination, I would have to find a way to prevent it from ever happening again. I would have to walk through life like a blind man, touching the walls around me and sniffing the air for clues, using multiple senses to get my bearings where everyone else got by with one.

If what I'd heard was true, on the other hand—if those boys really were calling me a faggot—then I was in even deeper trouble. Why? Because from where they were sitting, they must have known I could hear them. Their raised voices told me that they were presenting me with a challenge. I could either go out and confront them—and get my ass kicked for my trouble—or stay in the tent and seal my reputation as a sissy.

Until this moment, I realize now, I had never put together the pieces of the puzzle about my own life. I can't even swear that I knew, in the summer of 1968, exactly what a “fag” was. My only goal in camp had been to fit in, to win the respect of the other boys. I reviewed everything about how I had behaved that day to see where I went wrong. What could possibly have triggered their hatred?

And then it came to me: that morning, in one of my fits of eagerness to
please, I had seen another boy wrestling with his knapsack, and I'd stepped forward to help him take it off. It was an innocent gesture, the kind of thing that was encouraged at St. Joe's. Camp, apparently, was a different story.

How stupid,
I thought.
Stay within the lines, Jim. Don't give them any more rope to hang you with.

As I drifted off to sleep that night, I'd made my decision: I'd be one of the guys, be as strong and masculine as possible. And as soon as I got home from camp, I resolved, I'd find a girl and kiss her. The next morning, I threw back the screen on my pup tent, headed straight for the ringleader from the night before, and began a campaign to win him over. I was persistent. I kept him close, showed him that I could work harder, chop more wood, pursue more merit badges, and navigate the forest better than any other Scout. Through sheer willpower, I turned him from a name-calling enemy into a good friend. He never knew what hit him.

 

IN THE SIXTH GRADE, DURING ONE OF MY SLEEPLESS NIGHTS, I
discovered masturbation. And certain uncomfortable truths came slowly into focus.

Not that I was yet attracted to boys or men, not initially. But I knew masturbation was disallowed by Church teaching, that it was a form of evil. After that first time I prayed to God to keep it from happening again, but no such luck. I prayed and relapsed, prayed and relapsed, into high school and beyond. This might be the story of any red-blooded boy, but I felt totally defeated by it. If anyone was able to master this drive, it should have been me. Yet I failed again and again.

From the start, I knew I had to make a meaningful confession about this lapse, these lapses. But I wasn't about to whisper something like this into the grille at St. Joe's, where I was so intimately connected. Even though the priests had assured us that nothing we revealed would go beyond the confessional, how could I risk it? This was the first time I ever looked at a man of the cloth with suspicion.

But confess I must, so I took my sins to St. Mark's or St. Mary's, Catholic churches around the corner from the YMCA in Rahway. I remember
stealing into the confessional like a bandit, yanking the words out of my mouth like they were tied to fish hooks. The shame I felt when that unseen priest gave me penance has never been surpassed. Not even when, an evening or two later, I fell off the path to virtue once more.

Months into this biblical struggle, the battleground changed entirely: for the first time an image swam into my mind at the critical moment…and it wasn't Mary or Ellen or Elizabeth or Karen. Unfortunately, it was—I suppose I shouldn't say his name. He was a year behind me in school. Cute, blonde, skinny—and I had a subtle feeling that he was communicating with me on a private frequency, that we understood each other, were the same. As a young gay kid you don't realize you're searching for your own kind, but you never tire of the hunt. I was thrilled to find him, to discover that I wasn't alone in the world. And I wanted him. It's not a sexual quest, or not entirely; it's a journey home.

A few weeks later I was thrilled to learn that my interest was reciprocated. We were walking home from school, reviewing the day's highlights as we often did. When we passed his house, I was surprised when he invited me in. “My brother's got a collection of
Playboy
s,” he said. “Wanna see?”