McGreevey explains himself....

I came down hard on Jim McGreevey a few weeks back but good God, he now looks pretty good when you compare his misdeeds and lies with the possibly illegal activity of Mark Foley! Afterelton.com interviewed McGreevey about his book and he lays his cards out on the table. For that, he deserves some measure of credit. He also seems to have done a great deal of self-reflection as opposed to Foley's excuses to preying in teenage male pages: I'm gay, I'm an alcoholic and I was molested by a priest. Dude, Get. A. Shrink.

Anyway, here are some excerpts from the McGreevey chat:

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.

Click HERE to read the complete interview with McGreevey.