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Sauce for the Goose, Mr. Drudge!
Jeanette Walls Outs Everyone's Favorite Gay Republican Dirt-Disher

by Tamara Baker

Wednesday, March 8, 2000 -- ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA -- Awwwww.

Pooooor Baaabbbbbeeeeeee.

That's my response to Matt Drudge, dirt-disher for the Far Right (he calls himself a "libertarian", but we all know that's bullshit), on the occasion of his being "outed" as a practicing homosexual by MSNBC's Jeanette Walls.

As Ms. Walls reports in her Scoop column for MSNBC, the take-no-prisoners Drudge dishes out dirt much, much better than he can take it:

I have written a book called Dish, which is being published by Avon/Spike next Tuesday. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at the gossip industry and it examines the people who have been instrumental in the tabloidization of the media. There is, for example, a chapter on former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown — now running Talk. There’s also a chapter on Matt Drudge and his role in pioneering gossip in the Internet. I have nothing personal against Matt Drudge. I find him a complex, fascinating character, and I think the chapter about him is quite sympathetic. But, Drudge is upset because in my profile of him, I quote several gay former friends, including one named David Cohen who says he used to date Drudge.
I’m not out to hurt or embarrass Matt Drudge. I’m certainly not passing judgment on him. I do, however, find it hypocritical that a man who has become a spokesman of the far right has led a lifestyle at odds with the ultra-conservative values he supposedly embraces. Moreover, I find it ironic that a man whose entire career has been based on revealing the sexual behavior of others has a sexual history of his own that he now seems at pains to hide.

How did our hero react to his outing? Here's how, according to Ms. Walls:

...At first, Drudge denied the story, but later he became more evasive. "My youth to me is a blur," he told Rush. (Read Rush’s column on the Daily News online.) The next day, Drudge went after me on his Web site. "You’re becoming a laughing stock," he wrote. "Even by MSNBC standards."
Those are fighting words. Rather than address what I’ve reported about his sexual past, Drudge went after me for a number of other supposed errors. For example, he attacked me for saying that these episodes occurred when he was in his 20s. I wrote no such thing. The passage in question was merely a discussion of what Drudge did after high school. I made no mention of his age at the time. Drudge is picking up someone else’s misinterpretation of what I say in the book.
He also gleefully reports that I misstated the age at which he moved to Los Angeles. I wrote that he was 22; Drudge insists it was 19. My source on that was host Robert Novak’s introduction to Drudge when he appeared on Crossfire on June 2, 1998.

In other words, Drudge attacked Ms. Walls for making a series of alleged errors -- but in doing so, made several far greater errors of his own.

Typical.

Matt Drudge now joins such outed far-right gays as Arthur Finkelstein, Jesse Helms' favorite fund-raiser and attack-mail artist, who lives in Connecticut with his male partner and their adopted children.

Will the far right now turn on Drudge for violating their moral code? Or will they give him the same blind eye they've turned to Mr. Finkelstein (not to mention the blind eye they've turned towards FOX owner Rupert Murdoch's amoral excesses, which include adultery with a woman less than half his age, to showing the horrible "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?" debacle a few weeks ago)?

Of course, Drudge could be a man like David Brock, and come totally clean and say that, yes, dammit, I'm gay and I'm proud of it. But then, like Brock, he WOULD be kicked out of the loving and lucrative embrace of the right wing -- because that would truly be, in their view, the unforgivable sin.