Read Online The Confession by James E. McGreevey - Free Book Online

may be hard to understand the sinking feeling most every gay boy or girl of my generation experienced upon coming across this section of the library. Perhaps it’s something like what a child might feel after discovering that her fluish symptoms are really the signs of a fatal illness. All I could do in response was to slam the drawer closed, terrified of being discovered, and leave the library immediately, steeped in hopelessness.
    Still, in the months that followed I would return many times to peer into that card catalogue, thumbing the cards with increasing resignation. On quiet afternoons when I was sure I wouldn’t be caught, I nervously trolled the stacks and pulled out the texts, reading them with sweaty hands. They did little for my state of mind. I learned that “oral regression” and “masochistic tension” had caused my “inversion.” I was certainly diseased; on this point there was professional unanimity. I was a “counterfeit-sex,” a “third-sex,” an “intermediate-sex” with no expectation for happiness. Here was Stanley F. Yolles, MD, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, part of the U.S. Public Health Service, saying: “With broadening parental understanding and more scientific research, hopefully, the chances that anyone’s child will become a victim of homosexuality will eventually decrease.” I was a scourge, a threat to society, something to be eradicated.
    I was thirteen years old when I realized this.
    I don’t remember crying. Rather, I set a course of self-deliverance. The literature said my desires could be contained, so that’s what I set about doing. I read how psychiatrists regularly prescribed exercises involving girlie magazines in an effort to heterosexualize their gay male patients, a practice then called “aversion therapy” or “conversion therapy.” I bought Playboy s and practiced ejaculating while staring at the pictures. I locked myself away and vowed to fight this war till I won or it killed me. Certainly I would never speak a word about what happened between me and that boy. Instead I made new plans: I would make a fresh start, enroll in a parochial high school in another town. This is how small things become secrets, how the closet door is built.

4.
    I ALWAYS FELT MASCULINE, MALE, APPROPRIATE. GENDER CRISIS was never part of what I was going through. In 1980, the term gender identity disorder (GID) was taken up by the American Psychiatric Association to describe young boys who persistently adopt girlish behaviors (and girls who do the reverse), and even today the term is sometimes used to diagnose gay kids’ discomfort in their own skin. But a more enlightened school of academics have shown that gender dysphoria is extremely common among all kids, regardless of their sexuality; they maintain—and I agree—that the category itself is wrongheaded, another way to categorize gayness as a pathology. A girl who favors baseball mitts over manicures is no more “disordered” than any boy on her Little League team.
    As a child, I never had much interest in baseball or football; not until I started swimming at the YMCA did I start to develop confidence in my physicality. But I never showed any tendency to favor my female side. Some people have since told me that my slenderness, or something about the way I carry myself, suggests a certain persuasion. I reject this outright. It irritates me when people think they can pick all gay guys and lesbians out of lineups, or when I hear someone say “Aha! I thought so” after finding out that someone they know is gay. Some of the most effeminate men I know are solidly heterosexual, inside and out. It should go without saying that gay men are just as equally diverse on the gender matrix. Same goes for women. Line up handsome Christine Todd Whitman, my predecessor, alongside glamorous Representative Tammy Baldwin, the