Washington feasts on gay sex rumour

Washington is abuzz with speculation. A gay prostitution ring within the White House? Can it be true?

Such a possibility has emerged after a right-wing reporter who used an alias to obtain a White House press pass was revealed to possess something of a saucy past.

Bloggers revealed that Jeff Gannon, real name James Guckert, had previously worked as a US$200-an-hour gay prostitute who advertised himself on websites with names such as hotmilitarystud.com.

Guckert has resigned from his job as a reporter for the conservative online news site Talon News, owned by a Texas Republican.

It was not Guckert's past that attracted attention but his habit of asking soft questions of the President or his spokesmen and rewriting White House press releases almost verbatim and posting them as stories. On one now-notorious occasion, Guckert, 32, asked Bush how he was going to be able to work with the Democrats' leadership which "appear to have divorced themselves from reality".

He has also found himself at the centre of a major controversy over the outing of Valerie Plame, the undercover CIA operative and wife of ambassador Joseph Wilson.

During an interview with Wilson, the reporter suggested he had seen a classified CIA memo which detailed the minutes of a meeting at which it was decided Wilson would be asked to go to Niger to investigate claims Iraq was seeking to buy uranium.

In a city where access to information is all, Democrats have demanded an investigation into why Guckert, with almost no background as a reporter, received White House credentials, and how he got access to a classified CIA report.

Some reports suggest Guckert was the source of several stories that may have originated from the White House. Was Talon News, some asked, simply a convenient, conservative-friendly outlet for stories?

But some suggest Guckert's previous incarnation may have been what secured him preferential treatment from one or more officials within the White House.

Given the Administration's apparent antipathy towards the gay community, the blogsphere has been quick to fill in the blank spaces with speculation about Guckert's obtaining special access.

- INDEPENDENT