For years, internet publisher Matt Drudge has responded to questions about his reported homosexuality by obfuscating and dodging. It would appear he's still at it.

Witness his email interview with Chris Rovzar of New York, who elicited (GASP!) a reaction from the tight-lipped protoblogger to an item in Out that said the Drudge Report proprietor "happens to love Chaka Khan, The Young and the Restless, and sex with men" but is homophobic and anti-abortion-rights. Drudge:

"False. False. False. I do not love sex with men. My site is not anti-gay. I present both sides of the anti-choice-life issue... I liked Chaka in the eighties, and have not watched Young and the Restless in twenty years! But I do watch Judge Judy!"

The bit about not loving gay sex is a red herring: Drudge has never been said to particularly relish his homosexuality or embrace it; in fact his gay romantic/sexual side has been described (when alleged) as conflicted and awkward.

David Brock, the former right-wing writer, wrote in his memoir Blinded by the Right about a "scary" date in which Drudge, after bringing Brock flowers and navigating the Santa Monica gay strip "like a pro," stepped on a competing suitor's foot "really hard" (in Drudge's purported words) in a nightclub to scare him away from Brock. He also reproduced an overly blunt email in which Drudge wrote, "Laura [Ingraham] spreading stuff about you and me being fuck buddies. I should be so lucky."

Alec Baldwin stated that Drudge made an advance on him in an ABC Studios hallway, a proposition that had "kind of a creepy quality to it."

Given his purported bumbling of the matter, it's entirely conceivable that Matt Drudge has gay sex without "loving" it, at least on a level he can admit to himself, or furtive gay relationships that stop well short of that sort of intimacy.

For his part, Drudge has historically sought to blur the issue of his sexuality, tending to portray himself in ambiguous or asexual terms. He once said on his radio show, "There is no secret life here. It is found literally on the website, because this is all I've been doing." Drudge denied he was gay to the Miami New Times in 2001, even as he launched into a disquisition on (as the New Times put it) "the reigning DJ king of gay circuit parties" and summarized his nightlife thusly: "I go to straight bars, I go to gay bars." That clears that right up.

Drudge has offered more straightforward denials. He once told the Times of London "I'm not gay — I was nearly married a few years ago." But he refused to discuss his personal life further, leaving people looking for details to find stories dished out by the likes of Brock and Baldwin.

None of which is to say Drudge's statement to Rovzar isn't useful: At the very least it shows that the troubled kid treated "like shit" in high school is decidedly unhappy and uncomfortable being placed on a list of gay people, powerful though they may be. Drudge may traffic (quite well) in labels, but "gay" is one he just can't stand. At least not for himself.