Richard Grenell, who briefly worked as Mitt Romney's campaign spokesman on national security issues, says he left the job after just a few weeks because his being gay had quickly become too much of a distraction.

He says he was being attacked by both sides of the political aisle.

'The far left doesn't want a gay person to be conservative and the far right doesn't want a conservative to be gay,' he says in an interview with the Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California. 'Some of the most hateful, mean-spirited intolerant comments about me being the foreign policy and national security spokesman for Governor Romney ... were coming from the left.”

But the New York Times had reported that Grenell had been furious at being muzzled by the campaign because of the noise being made by some social conservatives over him being gay and pressure had been mounting on the Romney campaign from such groups as the American Family Association.

Grenell quit shortly after being kept off an April 26 conference call about foreign policy with reporters.

'They did not force me to resign,' he says of the Romney campaign. 'I resigned because I'm very passionate about foreign policy and national security issues. When the messenger becomes part of the message — if you really care about these issues — you should step aside.'

Grenell says he continues to support Romney's campaign despite the fact that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is against same-sex marriage which Grenell is in favor of.

'I think I am like most Americans in that we're multi-dimensional,' he says. 'We have varied views and we don't fit comfortably in a one-dimensional box that either the news media or some extremists on the left or the right want to put us in.'