“I became an avid student of human behavior”

New Jersey Governor James McGreevey resigned in 2004 while admitting that he was a homosexual, making him America’s first openly gay governor (albeit for just a few weeks). And now, in true American fashion, he’s published a tell-all book about living as a closet homosexual politician in the book “The Confession.”

The title may be plain, but the excerpts are graphically explicit. Most news stories on the book release lead with excerpts of McGreevey secretly engaging in encounters at bookstores and rest stops as a compromise to live his dual life, and starting relationships with men while his wife was pregnant. These and other details are titillating. But what I find most interesting are the compromises McGreevey made in his personal life. He feared that a relationship with a man would ruin career, and the sacrifices and adjustments he made to survive—and succeed—speak volumes about politics and personal ambition.

McGreevey said he also became “as avid a womanizer as anybody else on the New Jersey political scene.”

“I knew I would have to lie for the rest of my life – and I knew I was capable of it,” McGreevey wrote. “The knowledge gave me a feeling of terrible power.”

He said he became an avid student of human behavior during his rise from the state Parole Board to Woodbridge mayor to governor, and that allowed him to keep up the charade.

“I studied the moves, figured out what worked and what didn’t, practiced and perfected my perfect inauthenticity,” he wrote.

And how he also staked out his position on gay marriage from similar motivations:

Once publicly opposed to gay marriage, former New Jersey Governor James E. McGreevey now says he spoke out against the idea as a way to keep his homosexuality hidden.

“I did not want to be identified as being gay, and it was the safe place to be,” McGreevey said Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press. “I wanted to embrace the antagonist. I wanted to be against it. That’s the absurdity.”

Indeed. The image of the married Irish Catholic womanizer was a marketable image in the New Jersey political world, but behind it all was a closet homosexual, unhappy yet driven, who now brings us this book with a matter-of-fact statement about politics: “Ethical compromises are not just a shortcut to office; for all but the wealthy, they are all but compulsory.”

Fun fact: Half of all US states (!) have at least one openly gay state legislator, but not New Jersey, which is perhaps suprising given that it is one of the more liberal states on gay issues (being one of five with gay civil unions).