McGreevey Loves Brokeback Mountain

September 26, 2006

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I don’t know if you’ve noticed but former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey has a new book out, The Confession. He’s everywhere, doing the big media push.

I just read the piece in GQ where the writer, Jeanne Marie Laskas, clearly wasn’t buying what he was selling. Somewhere between being damned to hell by Elizabeth Hassleback on The View and his verbal three-way with Hannity and Combs, McGreevey found time to be interviewed for Twist, the nationally syndicated weekly gay radio show I co-host with Melissa Carter and Will Wikle. www.radiowithatwist.com

I received the book the day before the interview and started in. I’m about halfway through now and I’m finding it to be a well-written, seemingly honest and cautionary tale about the perils of a life in the closet. I think it’s going to be a good thing for gay people because it really describes the societal forces that cause people to live lies and the toll it takes on everyone involved.

Even Oprah seemed to get it, sort of.

As any Oprah watcher can tell you, nothing gets her gander up more than gay men who marry women, just ask the former Mr. Terry McMillan whose still nursing the second asshole O ripped for him last season. But McGreevey -- more than anyone I’ve seen on that show -- seemed to make some headway into getting Oprah to understand why a man would do that. I think I saw a light bulb go on there — a little one, anyway, like a Christmas light, maybe.

As for the Twist interview, like Oprah with her purple Post-Its, I had my book all marked up and I could have talked to him all day. When our producer told us that we had time for one more question each, I chose something that I thought could get a really interesting answer from McGreevey or totally bomb: “What was your experience like watching Brokeback Mountain?”

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