The Confession by James E. McGreevey

inside the adolescent’s head…. During this time period, adolescents focus on two developmental tasks: ‘independence from the family and the development of personal identity.’ This study suggests that the development of a personal identity by gay men and lesbians during adolescence is impeded by internal conflicts regarding one’s sexual orientation.
    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 notovercome. 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.
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    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 alwaysput 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