[Music]
I was 12 years old was exhausting day at
Boy Scout camp running around learning
how to make a fire merit badges and at
the end of a long day if I only had the
opportunity to come back to my tent in
to snuggle up to my sleeping bag and
about 40 feet away there were a group of
older boys sitting on flag stones around
a campfire and I was beginning to fall
asleep in that place of slumber and I
heard someone say homo queer and
these are words that terrified me but I
thought maybe this is surreal maybe it’s
just my fear and then I heard it
McGreevy ZAR queer agrees that he
doesn’t like girls he’s a homo and I
remember putting my face into my
sleeping bag trying to muffle my cries
my tent-mate said Jim don’t worry about
it they’re just jerks but I thought to
myself no I do have to worry about it I
am gay some weeks maybe a month
afterwards I had the occasion to go to
the local public library I wanted to
learn more about who and what I was and
I remember walking into the library and
going through the card catalog looking
up the word homosexuality and there was
a single card and it said for
homosexuality see sexual deviancy now I
was only 12 years old but I got a
feeling that deviancy isn’t where I
wanted to be and so I to the best of my
ability I read what doctors physicians
psychiatrists learned a minute
and written in these books and it was
horrific perversion developmental
challenges and at the age of 12 I
understood that not only what the boys
have said about sissies and weak and
homo and and now I had read with us
ostensibly the smartest people in our
society and our culture had said they
said whoa I don’t want to own this I
don’t want to be this so at the age of
12 with the limitations of my
development I made the decision to walk
into that closet and to pull the door
shut a decision that was reaffirmed
literally hundreds thousands of times in
the years and the decades afterwards and
all the resulting pain and shame that
had caused for so many you see identity
is typically transmitted from generation
to generation from loving person to
child but for many of the gays and
members of the LGBTQ generation of my
generation we learned it by ourselves we
learned it from Boy Scout camp or from
reading books in contrast my loving
parents taught me those good things
about my identity my grandparents had
come from Ireland in search of work and
to practice their faith
my father’s oldest brother at the age of
19 died on the beaches of Iwo Jima
digging up mine so the amphibious forces
could land and for that he was awarded
the Navy Cross and the Silver Star
my own father enlisted in the Marine
Corps in World War two and relisted as a
DI in in Korea and Robert Kennedy was
always a hero
he was Irish he was tough and he always
fought for the underdog and so one of
those positive cultural identifications
of family and faith and service
resonated closely to my heart that of
being gay was a dark ugly shadow and the
recesses of my mind and so I developed
an artifice I worked diligently to
create an external being so that I could
pretend to be like the other boys on the
playground
I wanted to satiate that cultural
identity after some time developed a
love of politics and government and I
had the occasion to be of service
eventually serving as governor of this
state and all the while wrestling with
that dark aspect of who I was eventually
in the year 2004 I came out and I
accepted my truth I said that I was a
gay American I didn’t come out willingly
I came out at the end of a lawsuit and
at first I was filled with such a sense
of exultation that finally the artifice
had collapsed straight gay head heart
and then there was this feeling of great
shame shame that all the people that I
had lied to shame at all the betrayal
and shame for sense of who I thought I
was and after that shame there was a
sense of transition transformation
because the thing that I was most
fearful of the entirety of my life being
was now the only thing that people knew
about me I was the gay governor the gay
American and what I had built so
diligently for decades was swept away
with the single speech and it mattered
little so what did I do
what do all disgrace politicians do you
get a therapist and then you get God not
necessarily in that order
therapists said Jim you’ve got to
untangle this this gnarly web of all
these identities and lay them out one at
a time being a father being a social
activists perhaps those we keep in
perhaps we give away being a politician
and then after such time I went to
seminary and had three wonderful years
in seminary the Dean of the seminary
said Jim I want you to go up to Harlem
to Exodus transitional ministry
it’s a reentry program for people coming
back from prison and I thought hey
they’re murderers thieves all I did was
have a gay affair and resign ironically
I would say playing the same tape that
those Boy Scouts did these are V me I
was better than they were less than and
when I went up there and I saw what
these men and women wanted they wanted
the same things I wanted three square
meals a place to lay down the love of a
family a job with purpose but society
had labeled them with a scarlet F and
four men and woman who had been in
prison for years and decades that
identity shaped them from their getting
up to their laying down they could only
understand themselves as felons as
criminals they may wanted have been good
parents but parents warned ex-offenders
and at the time in seminary I was
reading a lot of Carl Jung and Joseph
Campbell Jim talks about there being
basic or
types endemic in the human experience
that are almost part of preconscious man
and campbell says we need to understand
the monomyth that we are all heroes we
are all heroes on the journey of life as
we depart from the womb or from our
homes we engage in the world and then we
return and Campbell suggests if we
conflate our experience of lives with
that of the hero gives us strength and
meaning to our narrative arc into our
identity but it was tough with the guys
I was working with up at Harlem
graduated seminary and I took these
lessons with me to the Hudson County
Jail where the privilege to work on the
woman stare these were women again that
I looked at as scans passing judgment
cultural identity but I came to
understand that they were some of the
most special individuals who had given
me a great gift many of these women had
abandoned their children to the streets
had sold their bodies for a bag of dope
have been victims of sexual violence
domestic abuse but in that special place
we said we would go on this hero’s
journey and to paraphrase Joseph
Campbell we needed a cause greater than
ourselves and that cause was service to
each other and in small individual ways
we began to behave differently and that
evidence accrued and we began to see
that we were changing for I was on the
journey with the women there was one
special young woman angel she was in her
early 20s the product of a biracial
marriage and she was mocked and cheered
as a child
by the age of 12 she had been raped six
times the last time she told her mother
who told her to get back out there and
sell drugs because we needed the money
to to pay for the electric bill and she
said Jim I sat in the bathtub and
scrubbed and scrubbed was the last time
she cried she said life was too
difficult but I said angel let’s try to
do something different and so while I
had read Campbell and Yonge and all of
these journals angel said something so
basic to me she wanted to be a mother to
her children different than the mother
she had had and she would be that mother
and so in writing letters
and calling them and embracing them on
visits she was an extraordinary mother
and she said to me she’s a Jim I’m not
going to be that criminal I’m not going
to be that addict I am going to be a
great mother and she was eventually
angel was released from prison she was
reunified with her children she works
two jobs to keep the family together she
just recently had a promotion as it as a
manager of a pancake house and hopefully
this September she’ll be going to County
College you see angel gave me the
greatest gift yes we can reject the
cultural identities of our past we have
the will to choose an identity if we
have but the courage to be the hero of
our own journey for each of us be that
hero thank you
[Applause]
I was 12 years old was exhausting day at
Boy Scout camp running around learning
how to make a fire merit badges and at
the end of a long day if I only had the
opportunity to come back to my tent in
to snuggle up to my sleeping bag and
about 40 feet away there were a group of
older boys sitting on flag stones around
a campfire and I was beginning to fall
asleep in that place of slumber and I
heard someone say homo queer and
these are words that terrified me but I
thought maybe this is surreal maybe it’s
just my fear and then I heard it
McGreevy ZAR queer agrees that he
doesn’t like girls he’s a homo and I
remember putting my face into my
sleeping bag trying to muffle my cries
my tent-mate said Jim don’t worry about
it they’re just jerks but I thought to
myself no I do have to worry about it I
am gay some weeks maybe a month
afterwards I had the occasion to go to
the local public library I wanted to
learn more about who and what I was and
I remember walking into the library and
going through the card catalog looking
up the word homosexuality and there was
a single card and it said for
homosexuality see sexual deviancy now I
was only 12 years old but I got a
feeling that deviancy isn’t where I
wanted to be and so I to the best of my
ability I read what doctors physicians
psychiatrists learned a minute
and written in these books and it was
horrific perversion developmental
challenges and at the age of 12 I
understood that not only what the boys
have said about sissies and weak and
homo and and now I had read with us
ostensibly the smartest people in our
society and our culture had said they
said whoa I don’t want to own this I
don’t want to be this so at the age of
12 with the limitations of my
development I made the decision to walk
into that closet and to pull the door
shut a decision that was reaffirmed
literally hundreds thousands of times in
the years and the decades afterwards and
all the resulting pain and shame that
had caused for so many you see identity
is typically transmitted from generation
to generation from loving person to
child but for many of the gays and
members of the LGBTQ generation of my
generation we learned it by ourselves we
learned it from Boy Scout camp or from
reading books in contrast my loving
parents taught me those good things
about my identity my grandparents had
come from Ireland in search of work and
to practice their faith
my father’s oldest brother at the age of
19 died on the beaches of Iwo Jima
digging up mine so the amphibious forces
could land and for that he was awarded
the Navy Cross and the Silver Star
my own father enlisted in the Marine
Corps in World War two and relisted as a
DI in in Korea and Robert Kennedy was
always a hero
he was Irish he was tough and he always
fought for the underdog and so one of
those positive cultural identifications
of family and faith and service
resonated closely to my heart that of
being gay was a dark ugly shadow and the
recesses of my mind and so I developed
an artifice I worked diligently to
create an external being so that I could
pretend to be like the other boys on the
playground
I wanted to satiate that cultural
identity after some time developed a
love of politics and government and I
had the occasion to be of service
eventually serving as governor of this
state and all the while wrestling with
that dark aspect of who I was eventually
in the year 2004 I came out and I
accepted my truth I said that I was a
gay American I didn’t come out willingly
I came out at the end of a lawsuit and
at first I was filled with such a sense
of exultation that finally the artifice
had collapsed straight gay head heart
and then there was this feeling of great
shame shame that all the people that I
had lied to shame at all the betrayal
and shame for sense of who I thought I
was and after that shame there was a
sense of transition transformation
because the thing that I was most
fearful of the entirety of my life being
was now the only thing that people knew
about me I was the gay governor the gay
American and what I had built so
diligently for decades was swept away
with the single speech and it mattered
little so what did I do
what do all disgrace politicians do you
get a therapist and then you get God not
necessarily in that order
therapists said Jim you’ve got to
untangle this this gnarly web of all
these identities and lay them out one at
a time being a father being a social
activists perhaps those we keep in
perhaps we give away being a politician
and then after such time I went to
seminary and had three wonderful years
in seminary the Dean of the seminary
said Jim I want you to go up to Harlem
to Exodus transitional ministry
it’s a reentry program for people coming
back from prison and I thought hey
they’re murderers thieves all I did was
have a gay affair and resign ironically
I would say playing the same tape that
those Boy Scouts did these are V me I
was better than they were less than and
when I went up there and I saw what
these men and women wanted they wanted
the same things I wanted three square
meals a place to lay down the love of a
family a job with purpose but society
had labeled them with a scarlet F and
four men and woman who had been in
prison for years and decades that
identity shaped them from their getting
up to their laying down they could only
understand themselves as felons as
criminals they may wanted have been good
parents but parents warned ex-offenders
and at the time in seminary I was
reading a lot of Carl Jung and Joseph
Campbell Jim talks about there being
basic or
types endemic in the human experience
that are almost part of preconscious man
and campbell says we need to understand
the monomyth that we are all heroes we
are all heroes on the journey of life as
we depart from the womb or from our
homes we engage in the world and then we
return and Campbell suggests if we
conflate our experience of lives with
that of the hero gives us strength and
meaning to our narrative arc into our
identity but it was tough with the guys
I was working with up at Harlem
graduated seminary and I took these
lessons with me to the Hudson County
Jail where the privilege to work on the
woman stare these were women again that
I looked at as scans passing judgment
cultural identity but I came to
understand that they were some of the
most special individuals who had given
me a great gift many of these women had
abandoned their children to the streets
had sold their bodies for a bag of dope
have been victims of sexual violence
domestic abuse but in that special place
we said we would go on this hero’s
journey and to paraphrase Joseph
Campbell we needed a cause greater than
ourselves and that cause was service to
each other and in small individual ways
we began to behave differently and that
evidence accrued and we began to see
that we were changing for I was on the
journey with the women there was one
special young woman angel she was in her
early 20s the product of a biracial
marriage and she was mocked and cheered
as a child
by the age of 12 she had been raped six
times the last time she told her mother
who told her to get back out there and
sell drugs because we needed the money
to to pay for the electric bill and she
said Jim I sat in the bathtub and
scrubbed and scrubbed was the last time
she cried she said life was too
difficult but I said angel let’s try to
do something different and so while I
had read Campbell and Yonge and all of
these journals angel said something so
basic to me she wanted to be a mother to
her children different than the mother
she had had and she would be that mother
and so in writing letters
and calling them and embracing them on
visits she was an extraordinary mother
and she said to me she’s a Jim I’m not
going to be that criminal I’m not going
to be that addict I am going to be a
great mother and she was eventually
angel was released from prison she was
reunified with her children she works
two jobs to keep the family together she
just recently had a promotion as it as a
manager of a pancake house and hopefully
this September she’ll be going to County
College you see angel gave me the
greatest gift yes we can reject the
cultural identities of our past we have
the will to choose an identity if we
have but the courage to be the hero of
our own journey for each of us be that
hero thank you
[Applause]
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