Is anyone else tired of publications using the gay rumor mill to sell magazines and get Web hits? And, worse, the other publications and blogs that take those rumors and reprint them until all of a sudden there's "a story"? I know I am.

Star magazine is touting an unsourced claim (again) that Lindsay (LiHo) Lohan is romantically involved with gal pal and celeb DJ Samantha Ronson. The headline is blasted on the Star's Web site: The issue is "ON NEWSSTANDS NOW!"

As a magazine that wants consumers to think it's at the level of PEOPLE, its penchant for stories it won't publicly substantiate clearly kicks it into the gutter alongside its trashier colleagues like The Enquirer.

In this latest stint, Star sets a 'Mean Girls'-worthy rumor trap fully loaded with "desperate declarations of love" between Lohan and Ronson which it says come directly from private areas of LiHo's MySpace page. And how does Star know this? "Sources," also known as alleged friends of LiHo who allegedly had access to her private MySpace and allegedly sold out their friend to Star. Allegedly.

Like a good old-fashioned game of Lesbian Operator/Telephone, other outlets including the Star Pulse News Blog, Holy Moly, Film.com and others have taken the story and run with it. Some are reporting that Lohan's MySpace page was hacked. (Hacked. No mention of the sell-out friend. See Operator/Telephone reference.)

Even the NY Daily News (not sure why I said "even") picked this up -- as if it was *news,* -- writing, "It appears that a 'pal' has shopped poor Lindsay Lohan's private rehab musings to the press."

This story isn't news. It's gossip. There's a difference.

Whether it's true or not is

is immaterial. I really don't care if Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson are living the DeGeneres-deRossi dream. What I care about is calling out rumors that get turned into news, especially when they play the gay card which, as we all know, uses tawdry sexual intrigue to drive magazine sales and online ad revenue. I'm sick of gossip, especially gay gossip.

As Coach Carr told the class in 'Mean Girls': "At your age, you're going to have a lot of urges. You're going to want to take off your clothes, and touch each other. But if you do touch each other, you *will* get Chlamydia ... and die."

That's an unsourced rumor. It's not news. See the difference?