Jim McGreevey’s Open Letter to Larry Craig
Jim McGreevey has published an Open Letter to Larry Craig in the Washington Post that begins as follows:
My gut wrenched when I read of Sen. Larry Craig’s bathroom arrest. I remembered my own late-night encounter with the law at a Garden State Parkway rest stop following a political dinner in north Jersey.
I pulled into the rest stop, parked my car, flashed my headlights, which was “the signal,” and waited. Glancing in my rearview mirror, I saw a state trooper approaching. I desperately tried to convince the trooper of my innocence, showing him my former prosecutor’s badge, a gift from the office when I left. The trooper radioed his office and returned. “I never want to see you here again,” he said. I survived for another day.
I was in my late 20s. It would be another 25 years before my parallel lives collided and I was coerced out of the “closet.”
Why do grown men in their 20s, or their 60s, do such things? I can answer only for me.
One Response to “Jim McGreevey’s Open Letter to Larry Craig”
It’s a touching letter, and it describes well the psychological torture when someones’s natural state of being needs to be ‘closeted’.
At the risk of sounding cranky, though, I’m struck by how this misses the importand difference between behavior in private and behavior in public places. I don’t care who is having intimate encouters with whom, but others should not be put in the position of being involuntary witnesses.