Apr 08, 2005   | COMMENTS     

Those damn bloggers are just bound and determined to have a gay contestant on this year’s “American Idol,” the super popular glorified karaoke contest on Fox.

The latest target of Internet rumors is ANWAR ROBINSON. The 25-year-old New Jersey singer, who auditioned in D.C., has been pseudo outed on gay entertainment information Web site www.afterelton.com, the brother to lesbian site www.afterellen.com.

The site has posted a personals profile found in the men-seeking-men section of www.BlackPlanet.com. Of course, it could be a fake.

“BlackPlanet.com indicates that Robinson’s last login was Jan. 1, 2005, before the contestants for the fourth season of [‘Idol’] were made public,” afterelton.com reads. “No one knew at the time that [Robinson] would become one of the finalists ... which makes it unlikely to be a fake profile ... It also raises questions around why Robinson did not remove his profile once he was selected to be on the show.”

John Chiklis, the writer of the story, concludes that Fox doesn’t want the contestants to be out while on the show and claims to have “sources” who say that Robinson has been out since high school.

First season finalist JIM VERRAROS is the only openly gay contestant in the show’s history, and he came out after the series ended.

For those of you who forgot about Verraros, his second album of pop tunes, “Rollercoaster” is set to hit stores April 26. He also stars in “Eating Out,” a gay comedy that screened in D.C. last June and is being released in select cities April 8.

While the bloggers obsess over rumors about the next gay idol, it looks like Verraros has been busy getting to work.

Get shorty
It looks like the winner of this year’s Oscar for best short subject documentary may also have a short fuse.

Last week, Steve Kalafer, the producer of nominated short “Sister Rose’s Passion,” sent a letter to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences claiming that life partners Robert Hudson and Bobby Houston unfairly used reenactments in their award-winning movie “Mighty Times: The Children’s March,” the Associated Press reports.

In his letter, Kalafer says the film fails to disclose which scenes are reenactments of events from the black civil rights movement, Hudson & Houston’s subject. Dale Olson, a publicist for “Passion” told AP that “Mighty Times” is “an intentional deception to the Academy.”

Hudson had a bitchy retort for the Los Angeles Times, saying, “The pain you feel inside after losing can make anyone spin out of control.”
Ouch.

Musto be true
Village Voice gossip columnist (and Dish’s arch nemesis) MICHAEL MUSTO purged himself of a whole lot of gay gossip in his column on March 29. Unluckily for his humble readers, he took all of the names out, so we have to guess for ourselves.

“Which swiveling pop star has been known to pick up guys in the steam room at a Miami hotel gym — a lot?” Musto queer-ies.

“What handsome ex-series star (a Golden Globe winner) once flirted with a guy across the aisle on a plane and even tried to follow him into the bathroom, to the consternation of the actor’s young male ‘assistant’?”

“What marriage between a gay and a gal was partly done for the gay to get press and the gal to get a green card?”

“What two young hunks (one a faded star of an Oscar-winning flick and the other a broken-up boyfriend) may well have commingled several years ago when they were both more famous?”

These are a couple Dish figured out, let’s see if you’re as good.