Posted on Monday, May 22, 2006 - 5:00 pm:

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He does, however, comment on the role that sex plays in New Jersey politics, saying the two are "inexorably intermingled."

He calls the annual League of Municipalities conference in Atlantic City, for example, a "pickup convention."

"All around me, pickups were taking place in plain sight," McGreevey writes. "People would be talking about the event for weeks to come -- who got lucky, who got stiffed, and what everybody else thought about it.

"This was a terrible place not to be straight."

That connection between sex and politics also could be found in New Jersey's go-go bars, which McGreevey says he frequented as a way to deny his homosexuality, both to himself and to others.

"It was amazing to me how often we ran into local political operatives in such places -- because a great deal of New Jersey's backroom business is conducted by men while folding bills into the waistbands of women dancing in their laps," he writes. "It was like ancient Rome, or some tawdry modern variant in which aspiring politicians did their level best to be seen at clubs with names like VIP and Cheeques. I was one of those young men."

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