Inauthenticity is endemic in American politics today. The political backrooms where I spent much of my career were just as benighted as my personal life, equally crowded with shadowy strangers and compromises, truths I hoped to deny. I lived not in one closet but in many.

Ironically, the dividing experience of my sexuality helped me thrive in that environment. As I climbed the electoral ladder — from state assemblyman to mayor of Woodbridge and finally to governor of New Jersey — political compromises came easy to me because I'd learned how to keep a part of myself innocent of them. I kept a steel wall around my moral and sexual instincts — protecting them, I thought, from the threats of the real world. This gave me a tremendous advantage in politics, if not in my soul. The true me, my spiritual core, slipped further and further from reach.

There were moments when the ripping misery of this life became too great, moments when I thought about “becoming gay” and all that that entails. One of these moments came after I lost my first race for governor to Christine Todd Whitman in 1997. I thought to myself: You're at a fork in the road. You could give this up and be yourself. This is your last chance. But I felt compelled to keep running for governor.

I craved love. For years sex had been all that was available to me. From the time in high school when I made up my mind to behave in public as though I were straight, I nonetheless carried on sexually with men. I visited bookstores in New York and New Jersey and had sex in the small booths there until I became too famous to risk discovery. I lurked around parkway rest stops, exchanging false names and intimacies with strangers. But there never was an emotional meaning to these trysts, even the few that were repeat engagements.

The only place where I had ever found any real pleasure in these encounters was in Washington, during my law-school years. At the juncture of Sixth and I Streets, just around the corner from Judiciary Square, there was an abandoned synagogue and a narrow alley leading to the long-forgotten gardens in back. Every night, rain or shine, this hidden pocket of Washington filled with men just like me — almost all of them wearing business suits and, on most of their left hands, proof that they'd made the same compromises I had. We were the power brokers and backroom operatives and future leaders of America. We just happened to be gay.

Moonlight squinted through the stained-glass windows into our garden, catching an inviting eye or a face stretched in ecstasy. I looked forward to my visits there, sometimes two or three a week. I quickly learned whom to approach and whose advance to wait for, when to move quickly, which posture said “no thanks” and which said “please.” One evening, as I stood on one of the metal platforms back there, a word came to me: liberated. Standing there in full sight of this group of men, I'd finally found a way to show who I was. I am finally free, I told myself. When of course I was just in a bigger cage.

How do you live with such shame? How do you accommodate your own revulsion with whom you have become? You do it by splitting in two. You rescue part of yourself, the half that stands for tradition and values and America, the part that looks like the family you came from, the part that is acceptably true. And you walk away from the other half the way you would abandon something spoiled. You take less and less responsibility for the abandoned half, until it seems to take on a life of its own — to become something you merely observe. And when you're on the other side, in the shrubbery or behind the synagogue, you no longer recognize your decent self. Years later I realized I'd become both Gene and Phineas from “A Separate Peace”: the soul and the body, the person who tumbled from the tree and the person who made him fall.

An intense and inevitable thing happens after you win a big election. The jostling for power is wild. Republicans had controlled the governor's mansion for sixteen of the past twenty years, and now we were overwhelmed by pressure to bring Democrats and their supporters in from the cold.

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