If you’ve watched an E! Entertainment Television special featuring commentaries from various media gadflies, odds are good you’ve witnessed Village Voice columnist Michael Musto weighing in on the idiocies of celebrity culture. Although he’s turned into a bit of a multi-media sound bite queen, the writer has always been — first and foremost — a gay gossip.

Musto landed his position with the Village Voice in 1984. Now he has compiled some of his favorite clips into a book bearing the same title as his weekly column, “La Dolce Musto.”

“The Village Voice gave me a total free reign to be myself and set my own bounds for the column,” Musto told the Blade. Freedom allowed Musto to be out, something he says he couldn’t have avoided anyway.

“That freed me of any hypocrisy in addressing celebs’ private lives,” Musto says.

As Musto points out, a closeted writer couldn’t very well point the finger at a closeted celebrity, something Musto started doing long before such acts were as common as they are today.

“Nobody would respond at all,” Musto says about his early outings, which included the likes of Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O’Donnell. “The celebs were secretly fuming over my write-ups, but the rest of media would not go near it. Even speculating that a celeb was gay was considered completely taboo. As time went on, the gossip landscape changed.”

DURING MUSTO’S DECADES worth of scandalous revelations, he’s noticed a dramatic increase in the public’s fascination with celebrity.

“It’s partly the world that I dreamed about, where everybody’s doing the same thing, but it’s also a bit of nightmare,” he says. “It tends to make me a little less special. Now everyone’s gay, everyone’s snarky, everyone’s outing. But it just pushes me to go further.”

Musto cites his unique styling as a way to maintain readership.

“Even if people are doing something similar, I’m doing it with some kind of individual style, and that’s what people have tuned in for,” he says.

Musto’s book includes much of the gossip and wit that the writer is famous for, but also addresses some serious issues. Several columns are AIDS-centered and even Musto’s writings regarding Rosie O’Donnell’s closet take on a thoughtful, exasperated tone.

Despite more than 20 years on the gossip circuit, Musto says he never tires of airing others’ dirty laundry.

“It’s always been my No. 1 escape route from reality,” Musto says. “Celebs tend to operate on a larger scale, including screwing up, [which] is bigger and more exciting than [that] of mere mortals. Even when I was at Columbia College, reading ‘The Iliad,’ I was much more mentally tuned in to Cher’s love interest, [or] what was going on on the set of ‘Charlie’s Angels’.

“It’s just always been a catharsis for me and a great escape from the rigors of daily life. And everybody shares that. If they don’t, they’re lying.”

Even with all the dirt he’s dished, he’s never been sued, and while he certainly maintains a network of sources, much of his material simply comes to light when he’s out on the town.

“It’s amazing the things that you’ll hear and find out just from going out and talking to people,” Musto says. “I’m a very passive, Warholian type of figure. I don’t talk much, so people often feel the need to run up to me and bare their souls.”

Now that Musto has become somewhat of a pop culture figure, he sometimes finds himself the subject of gossip columns.

“It sensitizes you to your own subjects, because it makes you realize how horrific it is when something erroneous is written or something unfair or something is written about your looks.”

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