Gay ex-Governor wants civil union
Former New Jersey governor James McGreevey has revealed that he would eventually like to have a civil union with his boyfriend, Australian business executive Mark O’Donnell.
“What I want is what hopefully everyone wants, a loving family,” McGreevey told New York Daily News.
On Friday McGreevey won joint custody of 5-year-old Jacqueline, his daughter with future ex-wife Dina Matos McGreevey.
O’Donnell and McGreevey have been dating each other since 2005, when they first met at a cocktail party and began talking about books and history.
According to the Oprah show web site, when the evening was over, McGreevey, who did not have a lot of gay dating experience, asked O’Donnell, “So, what do we do now?” to which O’Donnell replied, “We have dinner.”
Today, they live together in Plainfield, New Jersey.
“I just knew that Mark was meant to be my life partner,” McGreevey told the Oprah show site.
“We just have a very full and loving relationship. It’s a great gift.”
McGreevey wrote about his struggles growing up gay, his two marriages, his affair with Golan Cipel and the demise of his political career in the 2006 memoir The Confession.
His future ex-wife will be released her own memoir, Silent Partner, this week and sat down for an Oprah interview, as McGreevey himself did when he released his book.
“I’m not in denial, but I don’t think he’s simply gay. I think he’s bisexual,” she told Oprah yesterday.
“I mean, he was married twice. He has two children. And, you know, I never saw him checking out men, but I certainly saw him checking out women.”
Her former husband has accused her of homophobia for denying that he is gay. He also claims she knew about his sexual orientation when they got married.
McGreevey told the Daily News he will be reading Matos McGreevey’s memoir.
“It might help me know what she thinks and feels,” he said.
McGreevey and Matos McGreevey have been engaged in a bitter war of words over the past few weeks.
If McGreevey does get married in New Jersey, he will have himself to thank, in more ways than one.
In January 2004, prior to coming out, McGreevey signed New Jersey’s domestic partnership law.
That law, which went into effect on July 1st of that year, gave same-sex couples the right to make health-related decisions for each other and the ability to file joint tax returns, but it did not include many of the rights straight married couples get.
However, civil unions have been legal in New Jersey since early 2007, and they give same-sex couples the rights all married couples get, though recently, couples have found there have been some problems collecting health benefits.
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