More: TEDxAsburyPark coming: Who do you think we are? Not only were the boys around the campfire right about him, but now he could see from the index card in the library catalog that even the smartest people in the world had determined he was a deviant. View Gallery: Jim McGreevey gets personal at TEDxAsburyPark There he found a single card, it read: 'For homosexuality, see sexual deviancy,' he recalled.įor McGreevey, a smart, earnest young boy - who came from a proud Irish-American family with its own storied past in American history - and who wanted to do good and be good in the world, it was too much to bear. Jim McGreevey to give TEDxAsburyPark talk on identityĪ few weeks later, McGreevey went to the public library in his hometown and surreptitiously looked up the word: 'homosexuality' in the library catalog. And I remember putting my face into my sleeping bag, trying to muffle my cries and my tent-mate said, 'Jim, don't worry about it, they're just jerks.' But I thought to myself: No.

McGreevey's a faggot.' He doesn't like girls, he's a homo. 'I thought maybe this is surreal, maybe it's just my fear and then I heard it: 'McGreevey's a queer. 'Homo, queer  and these are words that terrified me,' McGreevey said. As he drifted off to sleep, he overheard a number of other boys seated around a nearby campfire, use a variety of epithets to describe their belief that McGreevey was probably gay.