McGreevey’s cry for help
Arianna Huffington
Around noon on Thursday, August 12, my phone started g off the hook. New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey had just announced that he is gay and would resign, and it seemed as if the bookers from every television talk show in America–CNN’s American Morning to ABC’s Nightline–had simultaneously had the exact same thought: Let’s get Arianna Huffington. I was the proverbial two birds being killed with one stone–a political commentator whose ex-husband had come out as gay.
It soon became clear that this was a story unfolding on so many levels only a Shakespearean drama or a Verdi opera could do justice to it. There was the personal, the political, possibly the legal, and who knows what else to be revealed by the time we get to act 5.
But we are still in act 1. And in act 1 the spotlight is on the nexus of the personal and the political. McGreevey’s resignation announcement was undoubtedly the best political speech he’s ever made. It was powerful, compelling, emotional, and in sharp contrast to the prepackaged speechifying we are so accustomed to hearing from politicians. At this profound crisis point in his political and personal lives he sounded almost liberated. It’s hard to resist playing armchair psychoanalyst and wondering: Did McGreevey unconsciously make certain choices–like putting his lover on the government payroll in a high-profile position he was not qualified for–to force upon himself his public announcement, “I am a gay American”?
We can’t, of course, know what was going on in McGreevey’s psyche, but hiring his lover, Golan Cipel–an Israeli foreign national unable to obtain a federal security clearance–to be the homeland security czar of New Jersey is the height of recklessness and only makes sense as a tax payer-funded cry for help. Otherwise he would not have flaunted his closeness to Cipel, leading him to self-destructive acts such as accompanying Cipel on a walk-through of a town house Cipel was about to buy a short distance from McGreevey’s house. It’s textbook human behavior: The harder you try to suppress the truth, the more inevitable it is that it will find a way to come out.
“Thinking that I was doing the right thing,” he said, “I forced what I thought was an acceptable reality onto myself, a reality which is layered and layered with all the, quote, ‘good things’ and all the, quote, ‘right things’ of typical adolescent and adult behavior.” It’s worth noting that McGreevey made this statement on the same day that the California supreme court annulled the state’s 4,000 same-sex marriages, raising the question: What if the world were a more welcoming place where gay people could have in their lives all the “good things” and the “right things” without having to pretend they’re straight? After all, does anyone doubt that it’s exponentially harder to attain elective office if you’re openly gay? How else do you explain that we have no gay senators, only three gay members of Congress, and an openly gay governor of New Jersey only until November 15?
But even if Jim McGreevey did not want to hold public office, if he just wanted a marriage and children, the easiest way to do so remains opting for a heterosexual relationship. So the human costs we only got a glimpse of on the day of McGreevey’s resignation–a shattered marriage, the anguish inflicted on his parents, his wife, his daughters–are not just the result of his personal choices but of the roadblocks society continues to place in the path of the complete acceptance of gay men mid women.
By the time the curtain comes up on this drama’s act 5 we could be in the middle of a serious political scandal–or in the middle of his political resurrection. Either way, he had to practically drive the car right off the cliff in order to put himself on the road to August’s declaration. And that’s an indictment of our society and our political culture wars.
So until the final curtain falls, let’s seize the moment to reaffirm, loudly and without reservation, that to he gay is to be normal–whether you’re a governor or a gardener, a public figure or a very private one.
An earlier version of this column appeared at AriannaOnline.com.
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