McGreevey's Royal Gambit

The uses of adversity – in particular of self-manufactured adversity – were given a novel twist yesterday. New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey stepped nearly naked before his state and the nation and gave the most astonishing address in modern American political history.

We knew it was something new from the outset: "Throughout my life, I have grappled with my own identity" – do politicians talk like that? Something was instantly odd, a tone previously unstruck among the usual variations on executive press conference gravitas.

Resignation from office was in the offing, that much was clear. Our ears have been attuned to those sounds from long experience. Connecticut's John Rowland tutored us to them anew only weeks ago.

But this was resignation rung in a whole new key.

Jim McGreevey confessed that he was gay. But more, a “Gay American.” I said that McGreevey had stood forth "almost" naked. It was with that one phrase, "Gay American," that he clothed himself, a flag for a fig leaf.

Let us stipulate of McGreevey what we must of any politician: he wouldn’t resign if he didn’t have to. Moreover, in resigning, he would not make disclosures hazardous to political viability if he could plausibly resign on any lesser pretext.

The back story began to unfold within moments of the speech’s conclusion.

The name of the scandal McGreevey had hoped to avert was Golan Cipel – possibly a paramour, almost certainly an object of McGreevey's desire, whether reciprocated or not. McGreevey appears, at least with respect to Cipel, to have governed much in the mode of the homosexual King Edward II flowering favors on his Galveston. People around him no doubt grew increasingly restive and resentful and concerned. One is intrigued at what proportion of naivete and recklessness figured in McGreevey's gamble.

That said, McGreevey rather impressively seems to have seized the moment and manner of his outing and then rose to their occasion, at least in rhetoric, moxie and histrionics. Even most of the observant press appeared truly caught off guard. A valid contrast is to Clinton’s admission of his Lewinsky veniality: if for no other reason than because the extremity of McGreevey's situation was not known ahead of time, his moment will be regarded as authentically historic, courageous, maybe even redemptive by some, against the sham heroics of Clinton's post-deposition, nationally-televised coming clean.

Back to the uses of adversity. Intentionally or not, McGreevey has at one fell swoop cleared back another huge swath of previously inhospitable space for future mature discussions of the issue of homosexuality and mainstream American life. No such discussions will ever again be shadowed with quite the same veil of "do we dare?" as has, shockingly, continued to hang about them, until yesterday. McGreevey's address can and will be a standard for future political candor, vulnerability, humanity -- and audacity of resource.

But if it is a gay-right's milestone, it is an odd one. McGreevey evinced a palpable sense of relief, but no "pride." Indeed, a traditional Catholicism informed the diction and the delivery, even if the tropes were in an innovatively secular mode. McGreevey conceded shame. From his wife he sought "grace." All in all, there was a conventional confusion as to whether he was right or wrong, proud or humbled. Indeed, the question presents itself: is McGreevey really right to say he's "gay" at all – with all the political affirmation that goes with that? Or is he, rather, really a very un-gay homosexual who has allowed himself to become yet another very late latter-day casualty of unenlightened thought?

Whichever is true of him, his speech will have consequences. It has changed a dynamic, redistributed momentum. There was an instant emotional reciprocation to McGreevey's self-disclosure, and there will continue to be sympathy and emotional advocacy for him, even as evidence mounts that the uses to which he put his adversity are not all about poignant spiritual pain.

Leading New Jersey State Senator Leonard Lance remarked soon after the Governor's speech that a time will come for an analysis and calculation of the practical political implications of McGreevey's resignation. There are questions about its timing, its deferral until after the November general election. Politics will in the short-term reassert themselves, probably quite quickly. So, no doubt, will the more measured aggressions of criminal investigation. But beyond all of that, down the line and for a long time to come, the Governor has triggered a psychologically potent and strategically complex shifting in the tectonic plates of social and political bedrock.