The passion of Jim McGreevey

"The Confession" charts the New Jersey governor's path from Nixon-loving Catholic boy to Democratic player to proud "gay American." But his attempt at repentance amounts to little more than an egomaniac's memoir.

By Richard Kim

Read more: Books, Gay Culture, Politics, New Jersey, Reviews, Book reviews

AP Photo/Daniel Hulshizer

Then New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey answers a question during an interview at the Associated Press' Trenton, N.J., bureau on April 26, 2002.

Sept. 29, 2006 | As long as we're trafficking in confessions, let me begin with one of my own. Some years ago, I was a closeted homosexual. I was also -- and this is the embarrassing part -- YMCA Youth Governor of New Jersey, an "office" I campaigned for with cheerful determination and ruthlessness in rank high school gymnasiums up and down the turnpike. I admit that as I signed a stack of student-authored bills into "law" -- most of which legalized drugs or prostitution -- I dreamed that I might one day do this for real. I had it all planned: the Ivy league, law school, a judicial clerkship, elected office, even a political wife in the mold of Hillary Clinton, a safely sexless fantasy who at the time was peddling her disastrous healthcare plan through Congress. The first part worked out fine, but I was far too lazy to get into law school and much too faggy to deceive anyone for long, and so ended my fledgling career as a closeted homosexual politician.

Of course wide gulfs separate a swishy high school senior from a 47-year-old, twice-married sitting governor, but I mention this all to say that Jim McGreevey's story is not entirely alien to me. I understand how a child who "grappled with [his] own identity," who "felt ambivalent about [himself]" and "confused" might take refuge in the biggest charade of all -- American electoral politics. I know how the abstract comfort of civic duty can seem like an easy substitute for the nervy pains and pleasures of gay life. And in other, more mundane ways McGreevey's story rings familiar. He grew up in the working-class Irish and Italian Catholic town of Carteret where my parents owned a dry cleaners; it's entirely possible that I pressed the 30 identical white starched shirts that were his uniform and mask. I spent nights at the Woodbridge Mall choking down the petty, casual homophobia of the citizens of the city of which he was once mayor. I am, in other words, predisposed to be a sympathetic listener. But in "The Confession," his heavily hyped, putatively tell-all memoir, Jim McGreevey comes off as so fake, so unctuous and so thoroughly unlikable that by the time he writes that "on November 7, 2001, I won the election for governor of New Jersey by fourteen points," I could scarcely believe it was true.

I am apparently not alone in this response. Despite advance excerpts that ran in the New York Times and New York magazine (home of ghost writer David France) and an appearance on "Oprah" that contributed to strong first-week sales, McGreevey's confession has been greeted with either indifference or derision. Indeed the only quarter in which "The Confession" has been well received is among the leaders of gay rights organizations, many of whom are thanked in the acknowledgments for "making me understand my own struggles in a larger context." These groups are so desperate to star-fuck anyone lightly lavender that the largest of them, the Human Rights Campaign, recently bestowed its Visibility Award to 'N Sync's Lance Bass and his partner Reichen Lehmkuhl. That he is still disliked, except by those marginal and needy enough to embrace him, will surely displease the governor. As he tells us early and often, nothing satisfied him more than identifying "the people who were most prone to dislike me" and making it "my business to win them over." He adds, "I'd always preferred to bring my detractors close." And so here he aims to please a disgruntled public with a mixture of self-exposure, conspicuous contrition, tepid dish and newly realized wisdoms about homosexuality or ethics.

He fails on all these counts. "The Confession" is peppered with short quotes and allusions to Spinoza, Stravinsky, Maya Angelou, Armistead Maupin, Allen Ginsberg, Kant, Dostoevski, Seneca and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl to whose ordeal McGreevey outrageously compares his own. Each is meant to augment some sort of introspective observation turned object lesson. "If any good comes from sharing my story, I hope I can inspire others to open their doors and reveal whatever is hidden there so that their own true beauty shines through," McGreevey writes with false modesty. The premise that one would take instruction or inspiration from a man who rose to the top of the crookedest state in the union and then gave his lover a $110,000 a year job advising on matters of homeland security, for which he was clearly unqualified, is an insult to the reader.

All the more so because one gets the sense that, despite the self-flagellation and abundant apologies to his ex-wives, former colleagues and supporters, McGreevey is not all that repentant. His chapter titles "How These Things Happen," "Becoming a Born Leader," "How One Lives in Shame" and "What a Divided Self Can Do" smack of resilient pride more than examined humility. Early in the book he recounts a childhood game: Local boys would catch frogs, drown them in tar and then stomp on their dried corpses, releasing what must have been a very satisfying "pop." McGreevey helped catch the victims but says, "I don't think I joined in the stomping party, that day or thereafter." Though this anecdote is intended to demonstrate the need for an appreciation of "the value of life," it also functions as a recurring trope throughout the book. Jimmy McGreevey watches; he is in the mix, but always somewhat apart from the "scene of the crime."

So "The Confession" skims across the muck, from frog genocide to hard-drinking nights at Jersey strip clubs to cruisey Atlantic City conventions full of horny young wonks to the notorious back rooms of Jersey's pay-to-play patronage system where unelected party bosses trade endorsements for lucrative state contracts. All along McGreevey casts himself as a voyeur, a bystander, at worst an unwilling participant. He drank only sips of wine on special occasions or shots of vodka when campaigning in Russian neighborhoods. When offered a "snort of cocaine, piled on the tip of a tiny spoon" at an "SNL" cast party, he replied, "I put people in jail for that during the week." He made sure people saw him balling young, female campaign volunteers and oozing out of go-go bars, but only to maintain the facade of his heterosexuality (a ploy he's especially proud of). He remained scrupulously within the letter, if not spirit, of campaign finance laws. And finally, when his political aspirations demanded the kind of money and backing that only corruption can afford, he delegated. Indeed, the list of besmirched former McGreevey allies is long, but he takes care to name names and heap scorn and pity only on those already indicted, like real estate mogul Charles Kushner who hired prostitutes to seduce his brother-in-law and then sent the videotape to his own sister.

Next page: He was hooked, not on drugs, drink, sex or gambling, but simply on "being central in the world"