Matt Sanchez: I'm
"bad at being gay"

Right-wing darling Marine Cpl. Matt Sanchez, a.k.a. former gay porn stars Rod Majors and Pierre LaBranche, fielded questions from bloggers Wednesday on his deeply nonconservative past and appeared eager for more media attention to follow.

Sanchez told blogger Joe.My.God. he was "relieved" at the revelation of his past, which led MSNBC's Countdown show on Wednesday night.

"I've moved forward a lot and this past stuff is not something I want to drag into my future," Sanchez, 36, a student at Columbia University, told Joe.My.God. in an e-mail interview.

"I don't like porn, it reduces the mind, flattens the soul," he said on his own blog and on Salon.com.

"That's not hypocrisy talking, that's experience.... I can tell you that by the time I finished my summer tour of the major studios, I was pretty disgusted with myself," Sanchez said.

Not only is his porn past behind him, Sanchez said, but also any putative gayness: "Boyfriends: 0; fiancees: 2; wife: 1. I'd say I'm pretty bad at being gay."

MSNBC had fun with the story, juxtaposing highly censored stills from Sanchez's adult oeuvre with his appearances on such right-wing shows as The O'Reilly Factor--whose host later excoriated the city of San Francisco for honoring a successful local porn firm with "Colt Studio Day."

The Nation's Max Blumenthal found Sanchez's past less relevant than his role in a "gay Republican underground railroad" that hitches a message of hate to hapless but telegenic butch-looking people like Sanchez or Jeff Gannon.

"It doesn't matter, inherently, that he was a gay porn star," Blumenthal told MSNBC. "What matters is that he's a hypocrite who's advancing the ideological homophobia of the Right and helping them exploit this homophobia for political gain."

Sanchez, for his part, told Joe.My.God. that "there's something about the beleaguered gay psyche that wants to prove to the world that everyone is just as messed up as they are. So they start off with the term 'hypocrite' and work their way backward looking for signs of deviant behavior in hopes of discovering some type of bastard kinship. That's why I've had the term 'self-loathing' thrown at me so often. The gay community eats its own in a frenzied hope of self-serving fulfillment."

And yes, he said, he's writing a book.

While many right-wingers were silent on the story Thursday, O'Reilly's Fox colleague Michelle Malkin stood up for Sanchez, slamming the "hate-filled liberals on MSNBC" who "attempted to smear" him while ignoring the "pernicious effects of the pornography industry on the soul."

The marine reservist was outed by gay bloggers after his appearance at the weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference, where he was honored for his efforts to foster military recruiting at Columbia and posed with Ann Coulter, who shocked America by calling former U.S. senator John Edwards a "faggot" at the event.

"I, personally, wouldn't have used the word 'faggot' in public like that," Sanchez told Joe.My.God. "That said, Ann made a joke and that's just what she does. I wouldn't want her right to speak breached in any way."

He said he was surprised at the conference to meet folks more conservative than himself, an unusual occurrence in his home of New York City.

Perhaps the biggest shocker of all: Sanchez told Joe.My.God. that after 9/11 he voted for Hillary Clinton. (Barbara Wilcox, The Advocate)