In Aug. 13, 2004, James McGreevey announced his resignation as governor of New Jersey with a speech including the words, “I am a gay American.”

News outlets ranging from the mainstream press to internet sites such as McGreeveySucks.com claimed that McGreevey made a story out of resigning due to his sexual orientation rather than admit to the scandals his administration faced, including the securing of a government job for a resident alien, Israeli citizen Golan Cipel.

At the time that Cipel was hired, at a salary of $110,000 per year, McGreevey says that Cipel was his lover, but Cipel denies this; indeed, one of the biggest scandals looming over McGreevey at the time of his resignation was a threatened lawsuit for alleged sexual harassment.

In his resignation speech, McGreevey acknowledged his ethical lapses as the driving force behind his decision to step down, saying, “It makes little difference that as governor I am gay.” He continued, “Given the circumstances surrounding the affair and its likely impact upon my family and my ability to govern, I have decided the right course of action is to resign.”

Two years after he stepped down, The Confession — McGreevey’s memoir of his political career and his personal life, both spent terrified and in the closet — has been greeted with heavy criticism from many quarters, including the gay press. In Boston’s Bay Windows, contributing writer Richard J. Rothstein authored an opinion piece titled, “McGreevey is bad for the gays.”

A Sept. 24 editorial in the mainstream New Jersey newspaper CourierPost states, “McGreevey had hired his secret lover, Israeli national Golan Cipel, as the state’s homeland security adviser. … Worse yet, the state could have had a far more qualified person for the job — former FBI director Louis Freeh — who offered to do it for free but was turned down by McGreevey.”

But those who have read the memoir might find these critiques off the mark; after all, as McGreevey writes in The Confession, “Hiring a lover on state payroll, no matter what his gender or qualifications, was wrong. … if I’d been in the state Senate and some other governor had admitted this … I’d have called for his resignation.” Nor does McGreevey neglect to give his rendition of what went wrong with various appointees and contributors, answering virtually every major complaint leveled against him by the press.

Two curious things about the reception of McGreevey’s book — which quickly became a bestseller after its Sept. 1, 2006 publication — are the media’s focus on the book’s supposedly graphic sexual elements (McGreevey is, in fact, candid about his affairs with men as well as women, but does not offer lurid or explicit details), and the persistent perception that McGreevey has wrapped himself in a rainbow flag to deflect attention from his scandal-plagued tenure as New Jersey’s governor. McGreevey spoke with AfterElton.com recently and discussed, among other subjects, these very issues.

AfterElton.com: The title of your book is The Confession — not The Apology, or The Coming-Out, or My Life in the Closet. But a confession takes place after some sort of wrongdoing. What is it, exactly, that you see yourself confessing to?
James McGreevey: I’m confessing to my inability to live my truth, and confessing to the fact that for the majority of my adult life, I lived a lie. I’m confessing to the reality that I embraced fear as opposed to my identity, and most basically, that I didn’t accept my truth.

AE: The media have been focusing on the sexual aspects of the book, although it’s mostly about your political career and your family life — and the quandaries of the closet with respect to those parts of your life. Why has the media ignored the much larger political aspect of your story in favor of the sexual details?
JM: I can only say why I wrote it. I believe that I wrote a book with [co-author] David France with a heartfelt sense of describing where I got what I wanted, but [I only wanted] what I thought was available to me. I wanted what I think most people want; namely, a loving, committed relationship with another person. I thought because I was gay, it was beyond my capacity ever to have that level of love, that embrace. So, in part because of messages I accepted in my youth, I thought being gay was shameful, and a lot of that shame was wrongly accepted. Because of the shame that I wrongly accepted, I acted out in inappropriate and, for me, unhealthy ways.

I remember when I was a young man, a freshman or sophomore in high school, going to the local public library and trying to find writings regarding homosexuality, and at the time, the American Psychiatric Association referred to homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder, a perversion. And my church, the faith that I love, Roman Catholicism, referred to being gay as an abomination, a mortal sin, a damnable [thing].

And so, being 12 or 13 years of age, being gay was not something I wanted to embrace. I wanted to keep it as far away from me as possible. I thought at first that I could change who and what I am. I tried my own amateurish, boyish form of aversion therapy, of looking at girlie books and trying to channel, with all my mind, my sexual energies toward women. And when that failed, I tried to deny and repress, and subsequently tried to manage, however so badly, my sexuality.

The reason I was so specifically honest [in the writing of the memoir] was the need to show how, as I accepted that shame, I thought that I couldn’t live openly, in the bright light of day, a gay, loving lifestyle, that I then began to do things that were not only unhealthy, but the wrong course for me. I wanted to be candid and truthful in a story which involves a life of deception, and I wanted to share with the greater American public how shame — and particularly for youth, once it’s accepted and internalized — ironically produces actions which are in themselves shameful.

And being gay isn’t shameful. Being gay is as natural as having brown eyes or blue eyes. [If there are] those who focus on [the sexual aspects of the book] so be it, but I thought it was important, for those reasons, to [include the sexual elements] in the book.

Page 1 / 2 / 3 - Next