This Anti-Gay Federal Judge Seems to Have Liked or Likes Gay Porn

A reader tipped me off earlier this week to this juicy story out of Alabama, where a former state attorney general and current federal judge is in hot water after a photograph emerged that some claim shows him posing fully nude.

The judge is William H. Pryor, Jr., a staunch judicial conservative and outspoken homophobe who was named to the federal bench by President George W. Bush in a recess appointment in 2004 and confirmed by the Senate the following year.

Pryor allegedly modeled for the naked picture sometime between 1980 and 1984 while he was a student at Northeast Louisiana University. Sources indicate that the photo likely appeared in print sometime during the '80s and found new life in 1997 when it was uploaded to a bulletin board on the gay porn website Badpuppy.

Judge Pryor, who has a wife and two children, reportedly denies that it's him in the photograph, but Alabama blogger Roger Shuler claims that a prominent member of the Alabama Republican Party and close associate of Judge Pryor's positively identified him as the subject. Upon seeing the photo, he allegedly exclaimed, "Holy cow, that's Bill Pryor!"

A computer printout from the online gallery in which the photo appeared shows a cropped version of the image with the name "Bill Pryor" next to it. It says there are 15 pictures in the gallery, but only one seems to have surfaced so far.

If Pryor did indeed appear in a gay porn photo it would be quite scandalous given the fact that he rose to prominence, in large part, by attacking LGBT rights. When George W. Bush nominated him to the federal bench in 2004, the national LGBT orgs came out swinging. HRC noted at the time that Pryor's office filed a brief in the Lawrence v. Texas case arguing that sodomy "is a chosen behavior unworthy of constitutional protection" and likening homosexuality to incest, pedophilia, and necrophilia. Lambda Legal decried his "extreme judicial views," and then-Task Force President Matt Foreman called Pryor "an ideological tyrant of the highest order."

An mildly-NSFW version of the photograph is after the jump.

Is the naked man staring into the camera with pursed lips the same Bill Pryor who would go on to become an anti-gay federal judge, or are Pryor's enemies creating a fake scandal? Let us know what you think

First, a photo of a much-younger William Pryor: