DescriptionOn August 12, 2004 former Governor of New Jersey James E. McGreevey held a nationally televised press conference in which he announced his resignation and labeled himself a “Gay American.” In this project, I examine the discourses of McGreevey’s speech, the newspaper coverage of his resignation announcement, and McGreevey’s 2006 memoir in order to explicate the construction of the event. The analysis centers on two specific discursive contexts: the coming out script and the confession, in understanding the language of the “Gay American.” I examine how these two discourses were used throughout the construction of the McGreevey event to create both a memory of McGreevey as well as the Gay American construct itself. Lisa Duggan’s work on homonormativity and Jasbir Puar’s concept homonationalism provide a springboard for examining the Gay American construct as a new homonormative subject. Overall, this thesis seeks to explain how narratives of the media event surrounding McGreevey’s resignation were constructed and what implications these narratives hold for homonormativity in the early 21st Century United States.