I Wonder Who This Was?

And did he wear plaid pants?

Amid the political hullabaloo surrounding white-bread Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, gay activist Michelangelo Signorile remembers a much more colorful candidate.

"There was a contender for the federal judiciary in the George W. Bush administration who I began receiving information ... about him making sexual advances on men in gyms in Washington and other cities," Signorile told us Friday. Immediately after sex, "he would ... go into a religious tirade and then tell them how morally wrong all this was. His record was really conservative."

Signorile, whose collection of essays, "Hitting Hard," is out next month from Carroll & Graf, outed Malcolm Forbes not long after the billionaire died in 1990. He now writes for www.signorile.com and has a show on Sirius Satellite Radio.

Having heard the stories about the would-be federal judge, the writer made a few calls to the White House.

"They said they'd have someone call me back, and they didn't," Signorile laughed.

"The upshot of it was, this person was just quietly no longer a contender!"