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"FacebookPinterest\n\nHe really doesn't look any different: blue blazer, light blue shirt, yellow tie, clean-shaven, perfect eye contact, loves being here with you, wants to take you into his condence and talk the talk he has been groomed his whole life to talk. Only now he's promoting a book, The Confession.\n\nI don't know. Maybe a talky politician is always a talky politician, no matter how far he falls, no matter how cinematic, no matter how embarrassingly operatic the descent. I don't know. Somehow, I expected different. We've been sitting here discussing his life for hours in this ne Four Seasons restaurant, and the one thing I'm getting is: He's a talker. His theme has been authenticity, a word he uses repeatedly.\n\n\"To discover your own authenticity,\" he says, \"to recapture your own spirituality and rediscover your own sense of personal mission\u2014it's been the most amazing, unforeseen process. I mean, if you had told me in August of 2004 that I would've come out of this process integrated, whole, spiritually grounded, healthy, you know, that would've been some far-off ideal that I thought I could never grasp, that never would have been achieved. So it's been\u2014in many respects it's been lled with grace, but it's been diffcult. It's been excruciatingly painful.\"\n\nHere, he says, is the new Jim McGreevey, the authentic Jim McGreevey, the integrated Jim McGreevey who never before had the courage to be known. And isn't it ironic The authentic Jim McGreevey is the boy. The boy before he decided, at age 11, to publicly deny his homosexual self. Finally, the man has reclaimed the boy and all that he once denied. Isn't it ironic Well, no. Fortunate, maybe, but not ironic. He uses the word irony almost as often as he uses authentic, dropping it without connection, without antecedent, and often coupling it with the word ultimate, as if to invite you to hear a rigorous and playful intellect but not really expecting you to listen to it.\n\nHis book is a tell-all, a page-turner if only in urging you to jump to the good parts, images of a perfectly put-together New Jersey governor whose real history is a tale of lurking in Times Square sex shops, pulling his pants down with strangers in seedy turnpike rest stops, and of a blinding love for a handsome Israeli PR flack, Golan Cipel. He writes of bringing Cipel Stateside and having sex with him while Dina, his second wife, was in the hospital recovering from the traumatic birth of his second daughter. He writes of the decision to bring Cipel onto his staff as a homeland-security adviser with a six-gure salary and the sincere hope that nobody would quite notice the fact that Cipel, an Israeli citizen, had no FBI security clearance\u2014not to mention that he was not qualied for the job. But they did. And in short order, everything spiraled down and down to hell itself, ending with Jim McGreevey, at age 47, on national TV talking about looking \"deeply into the mirror of one's soul\" and declaring his \"truth\":\n\n\"I am a gay American.\"\n\nMaybe, at rst, we all thought, Aww. Or: How brave. Poor guy being forced by a repressive culture to live a lie, but at least he can be happy now. Even his wife was right there by his side, holding his hand, smiling a brave \"I'll always love ya, Jimmy\" smile. And his parents. Okay, his mom looked mortied, and his dad gazed heavenward, but they were there by his side. And emotionally, that's where we were supposed to be. That's where we were left when he disappeared. We were left with that image.\n\nThen he vanished for two years, avoiding the media completely. Now, a cynic might think: He was waiting for the big book advance (which he got, to the reported tune of a half million). A more generous person might think: He went off to lick his wounds, and to heal.\n\nYeah, he did that, too. He went into a twelve-step program.\n\n\"It is true that I suffer from an addiction,\" he writes in his book, \"though I barely drink and have never touched drugs in my life\u2026 I'm not addicted to sex, as one might reasonably surmise from my story so far. Rather, my addiction is to being central in the world, to being accepted and adored in the way that celebrities are adored\u2014by strangers, in abundance\u2026 My ego\u2014that was the dopamine receptor for my addiction, the thing that needed feeding.\"\n\nPutting aside how difficult that might be to swallow, he believes himself to be very (pathologically) good at promoting himself\u2014and that's what he's here today to do.\n\nHe wrote the book, he tells me, as an expression of self-discovery, of authenticity, of personal integration, and in order to help others.\n\nFor hours he talks about this, talky, talky, talky, all word and proclamation and explanation, no time to slurp his tomato soup, eat his salmon, or sip his Shiraz.\n\n\"You should eat,\" I say.\n\nOne thing Jim McGreevey wants the world to know:\n\nLeading a double life as a gay man trying to appear straight was easy for him to pull off. He was good at it. Not only that\u2014it helped him become a better politician.\n\n\"Now that,\" I say, \"is the ultimate irony.\"\n\n\"The cruel irony,\" he says, closing his eyes briefly as if to absorb the remorse. \"It was almost on a parallel track. So many of the adaptive skills I learned shielding my sexuality and feigning straightness, the skills that I learned as a child and as a young man\u2014you sort of repeat those skills in American political life.\" He is unfailingly sincere in his presentation, a steady-talking bobblehead. \"It was about maintaining separate and distinct realities.\"\n\nHe traces the divided self back to eighth grade, when, as an unwaveringly good Catholic altar boy, a Boy Scout, the son of a nurse and a Marine drill instructor, he needed to understand his thrilling journey to \"the last gate on the farthest pasture of gay sexual exploration\" with a skinny seventh grader he knew from school. He was terried of his own willing, eager, desperate participation in the sex. But there was no one to talk to about it. He didn't know anyone who was gay; back then there was no one even on TV except maybe Liberace and probably Uncle Arthur on Bewitched. So he went to the Woodbridge Public Library, only to nd that \"homosexuality\" wasn't even in the card catalog. Eventually, he found what he was looking for under \"Sexuality, deviant.\"\n\n\"I was like, whoa, this isn't good,\" he says. \"This is not a bandwagon I want to get on. I need to end it, I need to reverse it. Is this a phase Is this temporary Is this psychological How did I absorb this thing I've got to expunge this from my system.\" He bought Playboy magazines and tried masturbating. He locked himself away, vowed to win this war.\n\nHe lost. In high school and college and law school, he had sex with men\u2014scores of men\u2014but dated women, advancing the straight-guy image that he believed his planned political future was dependent upon. The anonymous sex in New York with the losers in the sex shops was decidedly less satisfying than the anonymous sex in D.C., in the alley behind the synagogue on the corner of Sixth and I Streets. Now, those guys, those guys wore suits, and they had wedding rings\u2014they had their lives beautifully bracketed. He often went two and three times a week.\n\nSo it was: Columbia, Georgetown Law School, Harvard School of Education, assistant county prosecutor by 24, state assemblyman by 32, mayor of Woodbridge by 34, and New Jersey state senator at 36. His rise was as swift as it seemed inevitable. He was charming. He was a workaholic. He was driven. But even back then, people wondered what, if anything, was beneath the ambition. Newspapers during his bid for governorship asked if he was anything more than an empty suit. There was a sense that he was somehow slippery, \"eerily hollow,\" that there was probably a lot more to the guy than he was letting on.\n\nAt 34 he married Kari Schutz, a librarian he met on a cruise ship, and had a daughter, Morag. They split up four years later, ostensibly because she couldn't handle the rigors of political life. To this day, he insists that she never knew he was gay. But by then he was already living a double life\u2014secretly gay, publicly a straight God-fearing guy who sure as heck needed a beautiful wife and daughter to complete the look. He had learned to live with a divided self.\n\n\"You begin to think, which is the ultimate act of hubris, that you can manage it,\" he tells me, his eyes widening, his face opening. \"I mean, so now I'm the master of my own universe!\"\n\nIt became the perfect asset for a man with designs on the White House. \"Because what happens in American politics\" he says. \"You portray an image, and then you poll that image, and then you determine, does the public nd it credible\"\n\nHe repeats this point several times, making sure I get it loud and clear: He was terrically good at deceiving people, and deceiving people is exactly the way to win in politics. Isn't that terrible Isn't he terrible He was so terrible. Watch him now: He's gonna punch himself in the face. He wants you to know he sinned, and sinned bad. He wants you to know that he knows what a terrible person he was\u2014taking preemptive strike after preemptive strike until you catch yourself thinking, Aww.\n\nI ask him why he resigned as governor. Could he not have claimed his sexuality and remained a public servant, become an authentic public servant, a leader legitimately qualied to advance the cause of human rights\n\n\"If it had happened differently,\" he says, \"if I had had the courage, which I didn't, to say, 'This is who I am,' I think I could've done it. But the difficulty was the circumstances against which this arose. It was, you know, well\u2026\"\n\nBlackmail\n\nMcGreevey claims that Cipel threatened to sue him for sexual harassment, demanding $5 million to keep quiet. (According to Cipel's lawyers, the idea for hush money was McGreevey's, and a subsequent investigation turned up no evidence of extortion.) No one ever quite bought the sexual- harassment story\u2014or Cipel's simultaneous denial of his own homosexuality, which indeed seems curious, if even a portion of McGreevey's account is true. If not for a love affair, why would McGreevey have hired him in the rst place He had few qualications for the job. McGreevey's version of the story was always the more believable one, if only because it was plenty damning all on its own: The governor had a secret gay lover.\n\n\"It was a mess,\" I offer.\n\n\"A mess,\" he says.\n\nIf McGreevey's welcome into the gay community has been lukewarm, it's because his coming out was not voluntary, was not about personal integrity or some courageous sudden realization, but rather about being forced out, trapped, a cornered mouse. He admits he would have never come out were it not for Golan forcing him to fold. He would have gone to his deathbed as a closeted gay man.\n\nMcGreevey's coming out was about nothing so much as changing the subject, saving his own ass, moving the public discourse away from the turmoil he had made of the governor's office and spinning it. (The widely rumored homosexual affairs were not the only dragons at the door; a federal fund-raising probe aimed at his biggest campaign contributors was creeping steadily toward him.) It was about offering up a perfectly true and believable mythology as damage control: Here was a sexually repressed man claiming himself, admitting his deceit, seeking the forgiveness America loves to give, and offering resignation as his act of personal penance (writ public).\n\n\"I had this blackmail situation,\" he tells me. \"I didn't know how Golan was going to act. I didn't know what would be said or not said during the course of a trial. I just felt that was the best course of action, that it would end any prospect of litigation and allow the state's citizens to move on.\"\n\nHe did it for the People. And for Dina, his wife, who was standing by his side at the press conference, gripping his hand.\n\nNow, Dina. It would seem that Dina should have popped into the conversation before now. But Dina appears to be something of an afterthought.\n\nI tell him I feel sorry for Dina. It's one thing to nd out you're married to someone who has been lying to you since the day you met but quite another to have to then wear your shame and your grief and your stunned embarrassment before a public that can't get enough of this juicy shit. He put her there. He used her as a prop. He made a fool out of her. I ask how he was able to live with himself, given all that.\n\nHe says he admires Dina, appreciates her courage, and that, sure, the reason he married her was for a political kind of companionship: \"She was interested in politics, she enjoyed politics. I mean, she was wonderful politicking. She was natural, she was flawless.\"\n\nMcGreevey writes that he wasn't sure if Dina suspected that he was carrying on a secret gay life. But she found out for certain two days before his announcement to the people of New Jersey. Surely, she had no idea that while she was in the hospital recovering from a C-section, cradling the premature baby she had almost lost\u2014she had no idea that while this was going on, her husband was at home, sharing cold cereal with his lover, kissing him, inviting him up to his bed\u2014her bed\u2014undressing, making \"a boastful, passionate, whispering, masculine kind of love.\"\n\nHow do you look a person in the eye after you have deceived her so\u2026 theatrically\n\n\"But I was also deceiving myself,\" he says. \"That's what's so basically absurd. At some fundamental level, I thought I was in charge. I maintained a public image of being straight, with a wife and a kid, and then on the side I had these furtive liaisons. It was a violation of my marital vows, it was a betrayal, it was morally wrong, it was objectionable\u2014and I can't say that strongly enough. But what had happened for so many years, the fact that I didn't lead this integrated, authentic life, it became too easy to accomplish. The entirety of my sexuality, my life, wasn't integrated, wasn't authentic, so you can compartmentalize, and that's the harm.\"\n\nRight. But what about the harm to Dina\n\n\"The punishment is in the sin itself,\" he says. \"The act itself is the punishment, and that's the basic moral violation. If you're not integrated, if you maintain two worlds, if you're not aligned with your higher power, it becomes all too easy to fracture. And I, ironically, paid the ultimate price for that.\"\n\nOkay, forget about Dina. What about his parents How did they handle their high-prole son leading such a high-prole double life\u2014and, as Catholics, believing it to be a fundamentally sinful one Were they angry\n\n\"I think everyone goes through different emotional cycles, myself included,\" he says. \"At times I was angry with myself. I said, 'How did I sacrice everything that I've worked for, for such a relationship, such a seemingly stupid relationship, an illegitimate affair' It goes back to, you know, when I acted out of truth and integrity I produced good things, and when I acted out of fear and secrecy I produced bad things.\"\n\nRight. But what about his parents\n\n\"My parents have, you know, total love for me, and they clearly were disappointed. I mean, this required hundreds of thousands of hours of work with a brutally painful experience, but yet I believed on some level they could see growth.\"\n\nOkay, forget about his parents. Forget about really anyone but him. Ask him about the people he's hurt and he'll tell you about his pain. He was a terrible person and he feels terrible pain about that, and pain is a terrible thing to feel. But it's not his fault. Blame all that bad behavior on his \"addiction,\" blame it on his \"affliction,\" blame it on original sin or the freakin' human condition, mankind's God-given capacity to split the self in two. One's severed connection to one's higher power can, after all, allow one to thwart any responsibility to anybody for anything.\n\nIn his book, he writes all about this: \"I came to understand how my affliction had motivated me to make my pacts with the warlords, how it made me believe that I could get away with hiring Golan. And I saw how it ruined my home life, how it ultimately brought me no more permanent happiness than heroin use satises a junkie.\"\n\nIt. It. It. The disease made him do it. His addiction to adoration. This is the understanding with which he proclaims his authenticity, after thirty-seven days as patient number 05271 at the Meadows trauma and addiction-recovery clinic in Arizona's Sonoran Desert, where he was diagnosed with \"severe adjustment disorder\" and treated for an \"adapted ego state.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I say nally. \"Let's talk about Golan.\"\n\nHe smiles. He picks up his fork. He knew this was coming. \"He's back in Israel.\"\n\n\"He never led the lawsuit,\" I say.\n\n\"I've had no contact with him,\" he says.\n\n\"You loved him\u2026,\" I say, feeling like I'm somehow prepping him for his Barbara Walters interview.\n\n\"It was instant,\" he says. \"It was an honest, true desire. It was what I was hoping for. I mean, I was hoping for a great passion, the great love of my life in this man. The ultimate irony is what I wanted was something so ordinary, you know, a loving relationship. I mean, what I wanted was so fundamental to who we are as people. A loving, supportive, committed relationship, with all the joys and all the sacrices that all of that requires.\"\n\nAnd his way of getting that was to\u2026hire him as homeland-security adviser\n\n\"Yeah, that was all wrong, bringing him into the state government. I wanted to make him happy. I enjoyed his company. And it made the divided self easier to bear.\"\n\nSo Golan\u2014the one person powerful enough to tumble his entire empire\u2014turned on him and gave him no choice but to go ahead and topple it himself. I point out that these are the sorts of offenses that might cause an ex-lover to boil over with rage.\n\n\"I am not angry at him,\" he says. \"I had no choice of being gay or not being gay, I couldn't control that, and at some basic level I also had to accept it, and Golan enforced that acceptance, and so now I'm blessed with that acceptance.\"\n\nBlessed. Everything about him just keeps getting more and more blessed. I am reminded of Jim Bakker and other high-prole evangelists who have gotten caught with their pants down, only to confess and confess and then attempt to rebuild their empires on that foundation of exposed humanity. I am reminded, more charitably, of people who bravely struggle through twelve-step programs. There is often a period of a high. I am reminded of anyone I've ever known who has stopped living a lie. There is every reason to do a freedom dance.\n\nI ask him if he intends to return to politics.\n\n\"What I'm interested in is advocacy work,\" he says. \"Focusing on children, focusing on poverty.\" Also, he says he's headed to China to work on a project to build an American-style university there.\n\nWell, poor children certainly need our help. And\u2026Chinese coeds These would not seem to be causes that grow organically from the story of Jim McGreevey. I ask again if he's planning to return to politics and perhaps work toward a gay-marriage amendment, civil-union legislation, antidiscrimination policies in employment and housing, tolerance of same-sex- couple adoption.\n\nHe speaks generally of his outrage that the political landscape is so antigay while the American public is so increasingly accepting of its gay citizens; he speaks of walking in gay-pride parades and of lending a hand to programs designed to help gay adolescents. But he says he thinks his main responsibility on behalf of the gay community is, simply, to talk about himself. \"I want to share my story,\" he says. \"My goal would be to have families understand that being gay isn't a choice. And what I seek in my life is love, commitment, and an opportunity to serve my community. So in terms of sharing my story, and recognizing my frailty and my humanness, my gayness, I mean, hopefully people will take a second look. And so, in that sense, I want to share, but my real focus is, you know, we've got 14 million kids every night in America who don't know where their next meal is coming from. The fastest-growing percentage of the population who are in poverty is children, and that's becoming more prevalent all across America. You know, I was in Appalachia seeing children who don't have any of the benets that so many of us take for granted. Or most recently, a couple of weeks ago I was in New Orleans not only witnessing the disaster of Katrina but also children having no mechanisms for coping with the disaster that befell them\u2026\"\n\nI probably should have never asked about returning to politics.\n\n\"\u2026the citizens, the families who comprise America, they have good hearts. This is a great country.\"\n\nAs a closeted gay man, Jim McGreevey lived a life of presentation, a gay man portraying a straight man. Now, as he sits before me portraying an authentic man, it is hard to feel anything for him besides very, very tired.\n\n\"Here, wait, you will love this!\" he says, shoving his chair back, yanking his briefcase from the floor, and propping it on his lap. It's an oily, weathered tan case, more rumpled professor than New Jersey governor, more \"I'm into organics\" than \"I wanna be president.\"\n\n\"Oh, wait, this isn't it,\" he says, pulling out a copy of a sermon he recently heard at St. Bartholomew's, the Episcopal church he attends every Sunday with Mark O'Donnell, the man with whom he has fallen in love. \"But this one is good, too. Here. Take it. You'll love it. No, really, you can have it. That is great, great. Oh, here's the one I was looking for! 'Live larger!' Now, that is a great homily. Uch, both of these are so constant with, you know, living larger and embracing change and embracing authenticity and rocking the boat. Uch! Uch.\"\n\nNow, the \"uch\" is brand-new. I have not heard that until now. It is the \"uch\" of a Jewish grandmother, that low, guttural utterance that translates to: I have no words. It is too big for words. This feeling I have is beyond the capacity of language to express.\n\n\"If you ever want to read a great book, get The Spirituality of Imperfection,\" he continues. \"You would love it. Uch. It's so powerful. I must have read it ve times. And on the cover, there's a vase with a crack. That's where the light comes in. That's where grace comes in. Yeah. Oh yeah. Uch. If you get a chance. The Spirituality of Imperfection.\n\n\"Yeah, yeah,\" he says, smiling, shaking his head. \"Uch.\" He is quiet. For the rst time this evening\u2014unrehearsed. Off the talking points. Thoughtful. I have no idea where this is coming from, but it makes the other McGreevey, the scripted, authentic McGreevey, all the more glaringly weird.\n\nA crack in the vase. Uch. How refreshing to hear all this \"uch.\"\n\n\"You just carry sermons around in your briefcase\" I ask.\n\n\"Oh, I just happen to have those. Yeah, if you get a chance, you gotta read those.\"\n\nHe loves church. He has always loved church. If there's a real casualty in all of this, it's his relationship to Catholicism. He has gay friends who are Catholic. He knows a lot of gay priests. He remembers with sorrow when the pope announced last year the restrictions of gay men entering the seminary. As a young man, he had considered entering the seminary, believing that perhaps a vow of celibacy would help him conquer an identity he believed to be sinful. \"When the pope came out with that, I said to my friend who's a gay Catholic, I said, 'What are we going to do' And he said, 'Pray.' He said, 'Go to church tomorrow and pray.' And I'm like, 'You know, God bless you, you're better than I am. Because I can't sit there and have someone tell me that I'm less valued than they are\u2026 I can't. No. I just got really\u2026in a weird way. I said, 'God bless you for hanging in there, but you know, I'm not going to be around for 2,000 years. This isn't happening on my watch!' \"\n\nHe laughs, mutters a few thoughts about Catholics believing that they've got the one true path to heaven, says that's still hard to let go of. He seems genuinely grateful to the Episcopal Church for its warm welcome and speaks glowingly of sharing a life with Mark. They just bought a house\u2014eight bedrooms, circa 1914, with expansive gardens\u2014in Plaineld, New Jersey, right down the street from where his mom works. They have two dogs, Rikey and Utah, and two cats, Miss Kitty and Kaitlin, and just last weekend both his daughters, now 13 and 4, were over, and so were his parents. And it would seem, really, that if he just drifted away into private life, went on being happy without having to swear to it on a stack of Bibles, no one would doubt it.\n\nAnd no one would care. Maybe that's the whole problem right there. If his addiction is to \"being central in the world\" and \"to being accepted and adored by strangers\u2026in abundance,\" well, then it would seem a private life is never going to satisfy the ol' dopamine receptor. (Accordingly, he recently auditioned to be part of a talk show on Bravo with Joan Rivers.)\n\n\"You know, early Catholicism offered the hope of gradual transcendence,\" he says. \"And the understanding that man is caught between the beast and the saint, and the goal of life is to move closer to the saint. I mean, the early church understood. And not to condemn the person! Because damn it, this is the human condition! We can kick the sh\u2014We can kick the heck out of a person, but that's what being human is about! It's the imperfection that lets in the grace. That lets in spirituality. That causes the change and the growth. Not being perfect. Not feigning perfection. Which is what we could do. Which is what I tried to do.\"\n\nTried to, or is still trying I wonder if the new McGreevey is any different at all from the old. Does anyone know this man \n\n\"It must be exhausting,\" I say, referring to the prospect of now going on tour to promote his confession.\n\nHe shakes his head, stares into his empty cup, smiles. \"This has been so great. Uch. You should get that book. The Spirituality of Imperfection. Yeah. Read that book. And go to St. Bart's. Ha! And thanks for dinner. I really enjoyed it. I did! Uch. Oh. I've grown. That's the best part of it. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's like my dad said, 'You have a lot to be humble about.' Ha! I said, 'Thanks, Dad.' Exactly.\"\n\nJeanne Marie Laskas is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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