Radar Online Publishes Hit Job on Jake Cruise

LOS ANGELES—Considering the breathless manner in which Radar Online has “exclusively” exposed two gay sponsors of the Southern California Scholarship Association—a nonprofit entity that produces the Miss Hollywood/Miss Southland Scholarship Pageant, an official preliminary to the Miss California and Miss America pageants—you’d think we live in Communist China during the Cultural Revolution. So what is the hideous crime committed by Ric Alonso and his partner of 21 years, Ernest Koneck? Hold onto your hats. Ric is also Jake Cruise, a gay porn performer who runs a few porn sites, and Koneck is … well, also a sponsor of the non-profit (and its executive director). Alert the media! The opening paragraph of Goodhand’s expose explains why the story is so inflammatory. “The Miss America pageant,” she writes, “stands for the empowerment of women, traditional values and wholesome entertainment, but RadarOnline.com has exclusively learned that one of the main sponsors for the California preliminaries moonlights as a porn star and runs gay porn websites.” Love that “exclusively learned,” as if Jake/Ric has been hiding under a rock. He hasn’t, of course, but neither has he opined publicly about his sideline, and for good reason! There will always be an outlet like Radar Online that will remind people that gay porn somehow is the antithesis of the empowerment of women, which will be news to most sentient beings on the planet. Here’s what Goodhand also has to say about Alonso’s relationship with SCSA: “As if the pageants aren’t direct conflict enough with Ric’s career in porn, he also launched a multi-faith website in 2000 devoted to ‘prayer launches’ called PrayersOnTheWeb.com, which no longer exists.” So now you can’t run a porn site and believe in God? Alert the media! Rader also includes a link to the “evidence linking Alonso to the pageant & porn” as if a crime has been committed. Other media outlets, including the New York Daily News, are running with the story. It will be portrayed as a scandal, as a scathing indictment of the sick underbelly of pageants. But nothing could be farther from the truth. The fact is, Alonso is just a supporter of the SCSA, and from all the “evidence” gathered, a committed one at that. Koneck, who has been involved with the Miss America pageant for 14 years, appears to have no direct association with his partner’s porn sites, and to our knowledge has never ventured before the camera, as Cruise has done an innumerable occasions. But in providing so-called evidence that is supposed to incriminate Koneck, Radar is in fact indulging in a despicable act of guilt by association. None of the documents of information provided indicates that Koneck is anything but Alosnso’s partner in life and in business, with no direct connection with the porn sites, which are run by a company called Jake Cruise Media. Even if he is somehow associated, so what? Has it negatively impacted his work with SCSA in any way over the years? Where is the evidence of that? No, this is just more of the same. Finding people who are unacceptably open about their sexuality and making them pay for it, even if in doing so others are hurt in the process. Hopefully, the SCSA board will not take any of this seriously, but if other sponsors or pageants make a hue and cry, Koneck could be gone. If that happens, Radar will probably think it’s done a good deed, but in fact it will have cemented its legacy as a haven of hypocrisy. The gossip site with the heart of gold.