The saddest thing about the coming-out experience of Jim McGreevey, the former governor of New Jersey, was that his sexuality didn't matter as much as he seemed to think it did. "In this, the 47th year of my life, it is probably arguably too late to have this discussion," McGreevey said as he announced his resignation from the governorship in an overwrought press conference on August 12, 2004. "But it is here and it is now... I am a gay American."

Actually, it wasn't too late for McGreevey to be having the discussion—it needed to be done sometime, and it was better late than never. But it really was too bad that he had waited so ridiculously long. At a time when some 275 openly gay politicians were serving in public office around the United States, McGreevey had denied who he was and then been caught taking the common political route of the cowardly closet case—showing off his wife at public events while sneaking around with a male lover (in this case, his highly paid Homeland Security adviser) for private satisfaction.

As the New York Times' openly gay political reporter Adam Nagourney noted a few days after the announcement, the twice-married McGreevey had ignored huge cultural changes when he apparently concluded that he could not be out and a successful politician. "Mr. McGreevey was 11 years old when the modern gay rights movement was born, after gay patrons at the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan defied a police raid," Nagourney wrote, coolly. "But there is no evidence that this uprising stirred any kind of awakening in Mr. McGreevey, as it did for many other gay men and lesbians of his generation."

Gay rights groups applauded McGreevey's courage in coming out of the closet at age 47, but a lot of homosexuals I knew wanted to slap him for taking so long and causing so much harm along the way. My ex-girlfriend from long ago, herself no fan of closet cases, has a stock answer to the question of how to punish people who fuck up in the way McGreevey has fucked up: "Their punishment is their life."

It does seem that some sort of karmic retribution exists for political closet cases. Jim West, the former mayor of Spokane whose current self-identification as "bisexual" appears be a bare-minimum description, was outed last year for using his positions of power (and his city computer) to court younger men. He was recalled by voters in December. He was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2003. Transcripts of his online chats with potential dates (and with a computer-forensics expert hired by a local newspaper to catch him) are now available to anyone with an internet connection, and these sad documents likely will outlive West. Similarly, McGreevey will be outlived by the admissions in a tell-all book, due out this fall, that he has written in an apparent attempt to stay relevant (and perhaps solvent). Titled The Confession, and now being bundled at Amazon.com with Brokeback Mountain, it reportedly will recount McGreevey's "truck-stop trysts" and describe how he honed a "perfect inauthenticity"—not the legacy he entered politics to create.

Politicians, of course, are not alone in staying in the closet far longer than warranted. An unknown but significant number of gay Americans do the same, and they do it without the flimsy excuse favored by politicians—that a huge, supposedly intolerant constituency requires a contortion of their psychic and sexual makeup. As with closeted politicians, these average-Joe closet cases are not the pitiable creatures they once were—the more it becomes acceptable to be gay in this culture, the more there comes to be an inverse relationship between one's age and the sympathy one deserves for remaining in the closet. Certainly, things are not yet ideal for gays in America, but it's hardly 1969. Even a person old enough to remember the pre-Stonewall days, politician or not, would now have a hard time coming up with a compelling reason for remaining closeted. The only people with a good excuse these days are those young Americans unfortunate enough to live in violently intolerant communities—and even then, that excuse only lasts until they're old enough to get to the nearest big city.

Cowardly average-Joe closet cases share the same punishment as the cowardly political closet cases—their lives suck—with added punishment of it not being news when they finally get around to coming out, or as is often the case, are finally outed. For them there are no overwrought press conferences, no book deals, and no invitations to become tabloid spectacles of late-blooming self-awareness. Instead, they get a pure dose of regret at time wasted, plus the knowledge that they hurt their own community by remaining invisible for so long.

Still, the average closet case probably doesn't do as much harm as a closeted politician, whose visibility and power amplifies the damage he or she can do. With this in mind, earlier this year I made a half-hearted attempt to out state Senator Luke Esser (R-Bellevue), who voted against Washington's gay civil rights bill last year and had long been rumored to be gay. When, after some effort, I couldn't find much factual support for the rumors, I decided to ask Esser himself. If he was homosexual, I figured, it wasn't anything to be ashamed of, so no harm in asking. It turned out that Esser was aware of the gossip but had never been asked the simple question: "Are you gay?"

"I am not," he told me last July, calling the rumors "a smear campaign that's not based on the truth."

In January of this year, Esser again voted against the gay civil rights bill, but this time, thanks to the defection of a fellow Republican who decided to turn his back on his party's homophobia, the bill passed, making it illegal to discriminate against the gay citizens of this state in housing and financial transactions. Meanwhile, I still sometimes get queries about the decision to put the question to Esser.

Usually, people want to know: What if he was lying?

If that's the case, I tell them, his punishment is his life.