if I ever needed a date Laura was game. We used to tell people that we knew each other from high school, playfully backdating our friendship, and everybody believed us. It explained how inseparable we seemed, and how totally keen we were for one anotherâs company. She was my best friend, and I adored her. Had I been straight, I surely would have fallen in love with her.
Since that dreadful kiss in the sixth grade, I had not given up on girls. Through high school I had accumulated a great number of heterosexualexperiences, mostly with girls I met at the Y, and mostly in the same pool where Brian Fitzgerald and I had fooled around. I canât say I was interested in these girls sexually, but I liked the physical contact, craved it even. I found it easy to perform sexually back then. I seldom had to rely on the silent movies of my imagination that became my crutch in later life. And every conquest became a résumé piece, which I broadcast instantly and thoughtlessly to anyone who would listen.
Once, when I was fourteen, my cad routine backfired on me with nearly disastrous results. My close friendship with a slightly older African American girl turned sexual during one of our weekend sleepaway tripsâa fact I never missed a chance to mention the rest of the summer. The romance lasted weeks, an eternity back then. Unfortunately, word reached her younger brother, a contemporary of mine and a really big kid. He was angry with me, and ashamed, I think, that his sister was dating a âyounger white guy.â Only by luck did I manage to talk him out of punishing me with his fists.
In college in Washington, Laura became my newest beard, and she seemed not to mindâmaybe not even to notice that I was using her this way. We kept seeing each other even after I transferred to New York City. There I told people she was my girlfriend, that I was involved with this woman who lived hours awayâwhich allowed me to maintain the impression that I was both single and demonstrably heterosexual. Laura and I remained âsteadiesâ when I moved back to DC for law school. We even talked about getting engaged, but she was too emotionally wise to let that happen. I donât know if she ever suspected I was gay, but I can tell you this: in all that time, we never even kissed. âPolitics is your first mistress,â she said more than once. First and only, I thought. When I finally came out, she called and laughed, in that pitch-perfect way of hers, âTo think I was almost your wife!â
6.
I SPENT THE YEARS 1979 TO 1981 AT GEORGETOWN LAW SCHOOL , yet I barely noticed I was in the nationâs capital. Though I went every morning to the campus on Judiciary Square, I might as well have been in Kansas. In three years I rarely set foot in a museum; I never climbed the Washington Monument; I hardly ever crossed the great expanse of the National Mall in daylight hours. In that fall of 1979, Allen Ginsberg was the keynote speaker at the first gay pride march on Washington. âThe burden of life is love,â Ginsberg told the crowd of seventy thousand. âThe weight is too heavyâmust give.â Yet his words never reached me; I carried my own burden in oblivious silence, deluged by torts and contract law.
Much is made of the fact that todayâs Supreme Court draws heavily upon Harvard Law graduates. Georgetown was a different sort of incubatorâa practical laboratory in power and justice. The curriculum was challenging; the faculty included future White House counsel Charles Ruff, Watergate prosecutor Samuel Dash, and former congressman Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest whose tenure on the Hill was famously ended after the Vatican ordered all priests to refrain from electoral politics. In such competitive circumstances, it was tough to make friends; now and then Iâd run into my old study partner Terry McAuliffe, the future DNC chairman whoâd followed me from Catholic to law school,
Since that dreadful kiss in the sixth grade, I had not given up on girls. Through high school I had accumulated a great number of heterosexualexperiences, mostly with girls I met at the Y, and mostly in the same pool where Brian Fitzgerald and I had fooled around. I canât say I was interested in these girls sexually, but I liked the physical contact, craved it even. I found it easy to perform sexually back then. I seldom had to rely on the silent movies of my imagination that became my crutch in later life. And every conquest became a résumé piece, which I broadcast instantly and thoughtlessly to anyone who would listen.
Once, when I was fourteen, my cad routine backfired on me with nearly disastrous results. My close friendship with a slightly older African American girl turned sexual during one of our weekend sleepaway tripsâa fact I never missed a chance to mention the rest of the summer. The romance lasted weeks, an eternity back then. Unfortunately, word reached her younger brother, a contemporary of mine and a really big kid. He was angry with me, and ashamed, I think, that his sister was dating a âyounger white guy.â Only by luck did I manage to talk him out of punishing me with his fists.
In college in Washington, Laura became my newest beard, and she seemed not to mindâmaybe not even to notice that I was using her this way. We kept seeing each other even after I transferred to New York City. There I told people she was my girlfriend, that I was involved with this woman who lived hours awayâwhich allowed me to maintain the impression that I was both single and demonstrably heterosexual. Laura and I remained âsteadiesâ when I moved back to DC for law school. We even talked about getting engaged, but she was too emotionally wise to let that happen. I donât know if she ever suspected I was gay, but I can tell you this: in all that time, we never even kissed. âPolitics is your first mistress,â she said more than once. First and only, I thought. When I finally came out, she called and laughed, in that pitch-perfect way of hers, âTo think I was almost your wife!â
6.
I SPENT THE YEARS 1979 TO 1981 AT GEORGETOWN LAW SCHOOL , yet I barely noticed I was in the nationâs capital. Though I went every morning to the campus on Judiciary Square, I might as well have been in Kansas. In three years I rarely set foot in a museum; I never climbed the Washington Monument; I hardly ever crossed the great expanse of the National Mall in daylight hours. In that fall of 1979, Allen Ginsberg was the keynote speaker at the first gay pride march on Washington. âThe burden of life is love,â Ginsberg told the crowd of seventy thousand. âThe weight is too heavyâmust give.â Yet his words never reached me; I carried my own burden in oblivious silence, deluged by torts and contract law.
Much is made of the fact that todayâs Supreme Court draws heavily upon Harvard Law graduates. Georgetown was a different sort of incubatorâa practical laboratory in power and justice. The curriculum was challenging; the faculty included future White House counsel Charles Ruff, Watergate prosecutor Samuel Dash, and former congressman Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest whose tenure on the Hill was famously ended after the Vatican ordered all priests to refrain from electoral politics. In such competitive circumstances, it was tough to make friends; now and then Iâd run into my old study partner Terry McAuliffe, the future DNC chairman whoâd followed me from Catholic to law school,
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