The Confession by James E. McGreevey Page B

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?”
    I was in eighth grade, he was in seventh. One thing led to another.
    If he had been a girl, I might be able to tell you how we tumbled through the afternoon, what her flesh looked like in the warm light, how she made me feel all grown up. But those details never seem innocent when you talk about two boys. I will say this: it was wonderful. I felt alive. But we didn’t kiss, as much as I wanted to; what is first base for straight kids is the last gate on the farthest pasture of gay sexual exploration. A kiss is too intimate, too loaded. I wouldn’t kiss a man till I was in my mid-forties, twice married, governor-elect of New Jersey, and an emotional mess.
    But after this boy and I finished examining the Playboy s and one another, I went into a total terror spiral. I couldn’t get home soon enough. I ripped off my clothing and scrubbed him off my skin in a scalding shower—a ritual baptismal renewal. I prayed nonstop to be free of the damnation that flooded my soul. “I will never do this again,” I promised. “This is a sin, an evil thing. Have I completely lost my self-control?”
    I never gave myself a free pass, not this time or any time in the future. Ithink it was Voltaire who said, “Try it once, you’re a philosopher; try it twice, you’re a sodomite.” I despaired from the start. I cast around for explanations and excuses. And, for the first time, I looked outside myself for blame. Who is encouraging me to do this? I wondered. Am I being set up? By whom? Who is responsible? I wanted to believe that all this was out of my hands, that it was something visited upon me by an outside force. I wanted to be blameless. I didn’t know then—nobody did—that the cause was simple biology, the effect nothing more than a boyhood crush. The only outside force I could imagine was Satan himself.
    Is Satan luring me down this road? Or is he merely awaiting me at the end? Either way, I was terrified.
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    THAT YOUNG MAN AND HIS FAMILY MOVED AWAY FROM CARTERET very soon thereafter. But his departure didn’t erase our history, which gnawed at me. I chose not to confess what happened. Instead of taking this thing to church, I took it to the Woodbridge Township Library. These days, hundreds of books are available to help gay kids understand their journeys, studies that prove that homosexuality is hardwired and immutable and undeniably common in most corners of the animal kingdom. Back then, many local card catalogues didn’t even list “homosexuality.” They went from homo sapiens directly to homogeneous and homogenized. I had to go to “Sexuality, deviant” to learn about myself, and the collected works were few and frightening. Most entries were for medical periodicals with names like Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases or scientific textbooks like Homosexuality: Its Causes and Cure, Sexual Deviance & Sexual Deviants, and Sexuality and Homosexuality, whose subtitle was: “The Definitive Explanation of Human Sexuality, Normal and Abnormal.” I knew immediately where on that continuum I fell.
    If you haven’t experienced it, it