The Confession by James E. McGreevey Page A

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 toplease, 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.
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    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 rememberstealing 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