McGreevey Had Gay Truckstop Sex While Maintaining Heterosexual Cover

James Joyner · Monday, May 22, 2006 · 2 comments

Former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey reveals his life of seedy debauchery before press revelations of an affair with a male aide forced him into coming out of the closet.

Jim McGreevey shockingly admits that before he became governor of New Jersey, he’d have anonymous gay sex at Garden State highway rest stops. “All I knew was that my behavior was getting crazier and crazier,” McGreevey says of his torrid truck-stop trysts in an upcoming book that details his tortured life of lies and sexual repression. “With each new encounter, I was getting nearer and nearer to being caught – which surely would have generated headlines, especially after I became executive director of the state parole board” in the mid-1980s. “The closet starves a man, and when he gets a chance he gorges till it sickens him,” he writes in his book, titled “The Confession.”

McGreevey revealed to The Post that he spent time in a psychiatric hospital at an Episcopalian monastery in the Hudson Valley after his stunning resignation as governor in 2004. And he describes in the book his fruitless attempts to conquer or hide his homosexuality by ogling Playboy centerfolds, frequenting strip clubs and becoming “as avid a womanizer as anybody else on the New Jersey political scene.” “The more the rumors circulated, the more public and brazen I became about my heterosexual conquests,” the twice-married father-of-two writes.

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McGreevey felt such shame, he writes, that he “split in two” – living on the one hand a life “that stands for tradition and values and America,” and another life that he pretended to ignore as “something spoiled, something disgusting.” But that duality only made his problem worse, and also made his forays into the world of illicit sex more risky and degrading. “In my case it went from the simple passions of a young adult – for physical and romantic love and happiness – to a particularly rank, unfulfilling variety of lust. I felt it get ranker and less fulfilling with each passing year,” he writes.

One would think. Yikes.