This week’s breadcrumb along the trail of my journey wasn’t gentle. It hit like a brick — one of those truths that shows up late, uninvited, and determined to rearrange the furniture in your chest.
There’s a man I used to love — or at least, the version of myself I thought I could be around him loved him. His name was Arthur Goldberg. Back then, he was a mentor, a a-cool-uncle‑figure, a guide. Someone who took me out to expensive dinners in New York City and other places around the country. He made me feel chosen in a way I was starving for. Someone I trusted so much that I endorsed his conversion therapy book. I let him help shape the way I saw myself.
And then, years later, I came out as gay. And he vanished.
Not a conversation. Just distance — felt like a cold, moralizing distance. It seemed clear to me that like many others at the time of my coming out, they only thought I was lovable if I’d stay broken, still acting out a version of me that was a lie.
It hurt. Deeply.
But the real rupture came later, when I learned he wasn’t just wrong — he was a con man. While I was a true believer (and truly very very wrong) I don’t know that he ever actually believed in conversion therapy. He was found guilty of consumer fraud for his conversion therapy group, JONAH. Manipulating people. Taking their money. Selling “healing” I am pretty sure he knew didn’t exist.
Then later I learned that Arthur was a much larger con artist than I thought.
As Executive Vice President and a major stockholder of Matthews & Wright Inc., a Wall Street investment bank,[8] he orchestrated a massive fraud from 1984 to 1986 in which the firm sold over $2 billion of fraudulent municipal bonds for several cities. The victims were mostly impoverished communities with large minority populations—such as the territory of Guam; East St. Louis, Illinois; East Chicago Heights, Illinois; Chester, Pennsylvania and Sac and Fox Reservation in Oklahoma. Goldberg and his associate, Frederick Mann, netted $11 million in unlawful profits from the scheme.
Thank you Wayne Besen for opening my eyes to his history.
And suddenly the hurt mutated into something hotter, sharper, more personal. Because it wasn’t just that he abandoned me. It was that I alongside many other LGBTQ+ people, we were conned; add on minority communities had been conned out of billions, my anger turned into white hot seething resentment. I was groomed into believing he had answers. Used as a prop in a story he was selling. A story that harmed people.
I keep thinking about those dinners — the fancy restaurants, the way he insisted on paying, the way it made me feel special. I didn’t realize I was being positioned. Pulled into his orbit so I’d stay loyal. So I’d stay a fan.
That changed…
Learning about his death yesterday, my feelings were, and still are, all over the place. None of them good.
How do you grieve someone who you later learned was lying to everyone, including you?
There’s no Hallmark card for that.
What I felt wasn’t relief. It wasn’t closure. It wasn’t forgiveness. It was something stranger — like a door I didn’t know was still open suddenly slammed shut, and the sound echoed through parts of me I thought I’d already cleaned out.
The breadcrumb this week wasn’t soft. It was a punch:
I can’t get closure from him.
But I can give it to myself.
I am also realizing that his death doesn’t erase the harm, but it does end the character arc of his influence over my story. And I get to decide what I carry forward.
I’m letting myself feel all of it — the anger, the betrayal, the grief, the disgust, the strange emptiness. I’m reclaiming the parts of myself he, we, tried to shape into something smaller, straighter, “more acceptable”. And I’m choosing to walk forward without the weight of his shadow
Here’s my midweek Wayfinder compass point:
So that’s where Wayfinder landed this week — not in quiet reverie, but in hard-hitting truth. Not in forgiveness, but in freedom. Not in peace, but in the kind of clarity that makes it easier to breathe.
If you’ve ever trusted someone who later turned out to be nothing like the person you thought they were, then you already know the strange, disorienting cocktail I’m swimming in right now. You know what it’s like to hold love in one hand and betrayal in the other, to grieve a person who hurt you, to feel anger and shame and clarity all fighting for the same square inch of space in your chest. You know how it feels when the story you built around someone collapses, and you’re left sifting through the rubble for the parts of yourself you want to keep. If any of this hits close to home, just know you’re not alone in the mess — I’m right here with you, trying to make sense of a truth that arrived far too late and still managed to land like a punch.
Coming Up…
→ Friday in Thrive–Tending to the parts of you that want to be a moss‑covered rock.
→ Saturday in Sexplorer–Intimacy that doesn’t sprint. Desire that stretches out on the couch and sighs.