Gay sex still manages to titilate the yahoos, especially when they write for the New York Post, Rupert Murdock’s right-wing tabloid. Take the case of James McGreevey, former governor of New Jersey who is about to publish a tell-all memoir, The Confession..

You may remember McGreevey from a widely televised press conference where, flanked by his wife and appointees, he announced, “I am a gay American.”

He was resigning the governorship because he preferred to come out rather than be blackmailed by a disgruntled boyfriend. McGreevey made no apologies for his homosexuality, didn’t pretend he was really having a drinking problem or would soon seek counsel from his minister. No, McGreevey came out and did so without equivocation.

“I begin my own new journey as an American who just happens to be gay and proud.” he said as the flashbulbs went off around him.

The announcement was both praised and condemned — though some savvy politicos saw the gay admission as a skillful smoke-screen intended to eclipse — as indeed, it did — the underlying corruption and cronyism of New Jersey’s business-as-usual politics.

McGreevey and his appointees were the targets of several serious investigations at the time. Not that this was anything new for a sitting governor of the Garden State. I live in New Jersey, home of Tony Soprano, and believe me, it’s no accident that there’s a saying in the deep South among politicians living high off their office: “Thank God, there’ll always be a New Jersey.” So blatant is career corruption here that I once wanted to design the state t-shirt: “New Jersey — You Got a Problem With That?”

Certainly in a state as solidly Democrat and union-run as mine, a gay governor would not have provoked the sort of hysteric outcry we might expect elsewhere. Yes, he was married and the father of two daughters but after his public announcement his high poll numbers remained solid. He became a sympathetic figure. There was even a grassroots move to have him rescind his resignation.

Yet he didn’t. Why? Well, when it came to our cute-as-a-button governor, there was plenty of actual scandal to go around.

His disgruntled boyfriend (below) — a ringer for Eric McCormack from Will & Grace — was a hot Israeli that McGreevey had promoted to the sensitive job of Homeland Security adviser despite a complete lack of credentials, and over the objections of the FBI which would not grant him clearance because he was a foreign national. Yet McGreevey awarded him the $110,000-a-year job anyway. This, in a post-9/11 New Jersey where the fumes from the burning Twin Towers could still be seen from across the Hudson River for weeks after the attack.

McGreevey’s Confession, while heavy on the tortured coming-out tale, makes no mention of his 4-year affair with the former aide. We do learn that since leaving office, leaving his wife, and setting up house with a new boyfriend, the first out governor in American history has kept a low profile, give or take a few Lambda Legal Defense fund-raisers, including one on Fire Island where he angled for photos with Sex and the City’s Samantha, Kim Cattrall. (But then, who wouldn’t.)

It wasn’t until McGreevey’s appearance this week at Book Expo America, the publishing industry’s largest annual convention, to promote the September release of his book that he met up with the press once again. McGreevey’s publisher had released 16 pages of excerpts from the book, spurring the New York Post to new heights of salacious rhetoric. “A turgidly written tale,” the tab sniffed, “whose subject matter sometimes seems better suited to a sleazy dime-store paperback than to a former governor’s memoir.”

Ah well, the New York Post — always a stalwart of the gutter press and a treasure house of leering, low-brow innuendo — knows well of what its speaks. Never a bore, always the Page Six gossip-rag of record, the Post describes the McGreevey excerpts in high tabloid-speak, managing to be both shrilly homophobic and hysterically funny. Their piece comes out of the gate, virtually shrieking:

Jim McGreevey shockingly admits that before he became governor of New Jersey, he’d have anonymous gay sex at Garden State highway rest stops.

“All I knew was that my behavior was getting crazier and crazier,” McGreevey says of his torrid truck-stop trysts in an upcoming book that details his tortured life of lies and sexual repression.

“With each new encounter, I was getting nearer and nearer to being caught — which surely would have generated headlines, especially after I became executive director of the state parole board” in the mid-1980s.

“The closet starves a man, and when he gets a chance he gorges till it sickens him,” he writes in his book, titled The Confession.

… [The ex-governor] describes … his fruitless attempts to conquer or hide his homosexuality by ogling Playboy centerfolds, frequenting strip clubs and becoming “as avid a womanizer as anybody else on the New Jersey political scene.”

“The more the rumors circulated, the more public and brazen I became about my heterosexual conquests,” the twice-married father-of-two writes.

The Post’s overheated huffing and puffing is absolutely relentless. And once again we hear the curious titillation, the prurient thrill that always ripples through this sort of writing, as if the scolds are actually getting off on it all, loving what they’re condemning even as they feel compelled to feign disgust and — that classic Post emotion — “shock.”

Compare this to the sober account of the same event in the New Jersey Star Ledger:

Former Gov. James E. McGreevey felt as if he were “marching slowly into hell” as he fought to overcome his homosexuality and failed, engaging in anonymous trysts with men at highway rest stops even as he polished the image that would propel him to the state’s highest office, he writes in his tell-all memoir.

“I’m doing great,” McGreevey, 48, said in a brief interview [at the Book Expo]. “I’m in a good place.”

McGreevey’s easy manner stood in contrast to the tone of the excerpts, which portray a tortured man struggling to subjugate desires demonized by his Catholic faith and by his family. Disclosure of his secret, he was certain, would derail the political career he coveted.

“I knew I would have to lie for the rest of my life — and I knew I was capable of it,” McGreevey writes. “The knowledge gave me a feeling of terrible power.”

… What he really craved, he writes, was a relationship with a man, and because he couldn’t have one out in the open, he resorted to hushed encounters.

“As glorious and meaningful as it would have been to have a loving and sound sexual experience with another man, I knew I’d have to undo my happiness step by step as I began chasing my dream of a public career and the kind of ‘acceptable’ life that went with it,” McGreevey writes.

“So, instead, I settled for the detached anonymity of bookstores and rest stops — a compromise, but one that was wholly unfulfilling and morally unsatisfactory.”

Not as much fun perhaps as the masturbatory prose of the Post. But accurate. Measured. And a man, I think, we can all recognize.