Jeffrey McGowan - Major Conflict

In many ways January 1985 was a watershed month for me, a month in which both my professional and my personal life would change dramatically and move in directions I’d never imagined. When I wasn’t working at the bookstore, I spent much of my time waiting anxiously for my grades to arrive from Fordham. My grandmother had spread the word throughout the building, so everyone was rooting for me, waiting with me, and, when the news finally arrived, everyone celebrated. My grandmother was so proud and happy that, knowing how hard the long commute was for me every day and how much I wanted to live on campus, she went ahead and paid for my room and board without telling me. I was stunned. I have no idea how she figured out how much it was and where to send the money order and all that. She was seventy-eight years old, after all. We had a rotary phone. She believed most of what was written in the National Enquirer , especially anything to do with aliens. I suppose I underestimated her. What I never underestimated, though, was her enormous heart, which I’ll be grateful for until the day I die.

The other event that shook up my life in January 1985 was meeting a guy whom I’d become involved with off and on until we finally lost touch in the early nineties. The first time I saw him he was working a cash register in what we affectionately called “the pit.” It was the busiest cash-wrap area in the store, and most of the new clerks were thrown in there at first as a kind of initiation. His name was Greg, and he was a tall, skinny guy, good-looking, with short, straight brown hair. I was drawn to him right away, though I can’t say I understood why. I didn’t think of myself as gay then, and I don’t think I was even capable of translating my attraction to Greg into a language that made any kind of emotional or sexual sense. It was as if a light switch had been flipped on and I had no idea how the switch worked, what it was connected to, or where the source of energy was located. All I knew was that something that hadn’t been lit before suddenly now was, and I was drawn to it like the proverbial moth to the flame. That switch has been turned on for me twice since Greg, and each time I’ve gotten better at recognizing all the qualities of the light, and at understanding the source, and at making sure not to hurt the person inside the light. But with Greg I was a novice, I was totally lost, and he ended up being the first great casualty in my journey toward self-acceptance.

Greg and I became fast friends, taking lunch together, spending our break time together. It got to the point where if you saw one of us you were bound to see the other. He said he wanted to learn Spanish, so I started giving him lessons. We walked to the train together at night, down Fifth Avenue and over to Grand Central, where sometimes we’d sit on a closed OTB (Off Track Betting) counter and talk. He’d smoke three or four cigarettes and I’d eat a pack of Starbursts, and we’d talk about religion (he was an atheist, was reading too much Sartre, I thought) and politics (he was a big liberal, I was a small one). We’d talk about everything, and in the evenings we’d talk more on the phone. Sometimes we’d talk for two or three hours. One night we went out with a bunch of people after work and had too many beers and on the way to the train Greg just came out and said how much he liked me, that he was attracted to me. I said I was flattered but I wasn’t into men, and he said sorry, sorry, but after that moment I found myself even more drawn to him.

The truth was I’d never been so close to a gay man before. And being so close, and seeing how perfectly at ease he seemed to be with his sexuality, all my preconceptions about gay men—that they were effeminate, that they were weak, that they were only hairdressers and dog groomers and interior decorators—began to fall away in the face of the evidence now before me. Greg wasn’t a theoretical gay person, some perfect stranger who rolls by on his roller skates whom I know nothing about, but a real person, standing in front of me, talking to me, at ease in his body, not so strange or unfamiliar or that much different from me at all.

While this was happening at the bookstore my first semester on campus at Fordham was in full swing. The two parts of my life seemed oceans away, irreconcilable, as different as the idyllic Rose Hill campus of Fordham—with its bucolic setting and nineteenth-century buildings—was from the crime-ridden streets of the Bronx just beyond the campus walls. At Fordham I was the hard-drinking ROTC guy. I thought of myself as a leader, all-American, a man’s man. I overcompensated at school, throwing myself more dramatically into typical college-boy activities, as if by doing this I’d cancel out all the uncomfortable feelings Greg was bringing up in me. And in a way it worked. Basically, he stopped existing when I was on campus.

Though I studied hard, ROTC was my primary focus. The weekly training convinced me more than ever that I was meant to be a career officer. The ROTC staff at Fordham was fantastic. One person stood out, however, and he would become my close mentor and friend for years. His name was Sergeant Major Robert Carpenter. He was a Green Beret who had served three tours of duty in Vietnam. He started his career in the 82nd Airborne in 1961 and was selected to become a Green Beret not long after being made sergeant. Originally from Virginia, he’d gone into the army out of a great love for soldiering and to make a better life for himself. He was everything I wanted to be. All of us in the ROTC idolized him. Not only was he a great soldier, he was a great man, someone who just totally kicked ass. From him we learned not only our basic soldiering skills, but the culture and ethos of army life as well. His stories, especially his Vietnam stories, which he told like a pro, taught us that becoming a soldier is far more than just learning how to fire weapons and how to employ tactics and strategy; it involves becoming part of a special community, learning a new language, a new spirit, embracing ideals unique to army life.

We couldn’t have been more different. He was from the South and had only a high school education. I was a city kid from Queens going to college. But he had a way of making all of that irrelevant; he’s what I refer to as “true blue.” He served selflessly, enduring great hardship on numerous deployments to protect our interests and our country. Guys like him are why we’re free, why the United States remains the greatest power on earth. He was a father figure not only to me, but to almost everyone who had the privilege of being trained by him. He was my hero, and I always wanted him to be proud of me. I hope that if he reads this book, he’ll understand.

The problem was that as I tried making Robert Carpenter my role model, I kept running into a kind of disconnect on those occasions when I failed to keep my two lives separate, when I wasn’t able to keep Greg out of my mind. What would Sergeant Major Carpenter think about that? I didn’t even have to ask myself the question. I felt certain that he’d disapprove and disapprove mightily. And so I’d try even harder to convince myself that what I was feeling for Greg was nothing at all, really, that I was completely straight after all. There was simply no room in the self-image I was creating for the feelings Greg was stirring up in me.

But I was learning fast that it wasn’t something I could control entirely. I found myself spending more and more time with Greg, going into work on my days off just to see him, going out with him after work for drinks, spending even more time with him on the phone at night. At work, when we were alone, I’d massage his shoulders and back playfully; one day, as we were sitting on the OTB counter at Grand Central, I lifted up his hand without thinking and looked at it, then took hold of it and tucked our locked hands between us. From that day on, though it made me nearly sick with fear, this was something we always did there, on the closed OTB counter at Grand Central; we secretly held hands while he smoked his cigarettes and I chewed my Starbursts.