Was Nixon gay? No, but that doesn’t stop the rumor mill.

Richard Nixon was many things — crafty, criminal, self-pitying, vengeful, paranoid. But gay?

According to a book to be released Tuesday, “Nixon’s Darkest Secrets,” the former president and his best friend, Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, had a relationship of a “possibly homosexual nature.” But author Don Fulsom, a former radio reporter who covered the White House from Lyndon Johnson’s presidency to Bill Clinton’s, provides scant evidence for this claim. No new White House tapes. No love letters, incriminating pictures or diary entries. No recently declassified government documents. Just a recollection from retired journalist Bonnie Angelo, who, in an interview with me, confirmed the story she told Fulsom: In 1972, she saw a tipsy Nixon pull Rebozo into a group photo at a Florida restaurant and hold his hand for “upwards of a minute.”

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That’s pretty thin gruel — but not so thin that it keeps the author from enthusiastic speculation. “Was Nixon’s tough-guy attitude toward gays just a cover for his own homosexuality, bisexuality or asexuality?” Fulsom writes. “Well, he isn’t still called ‘Tricky Dick’ for nothing.”

The book attempts to buttress the homosexual allegation by repeating rumors that the twice-divorced Rebozo, known as a ladies’ man, was gay. But this claim is secondhand, based on another controversial Nixon book, by author Anthony Summers, that was widely criticized for relying on second- or third-hand sources of dubious credibility. Fulsom provides no independent verification of the sketchy assertion.

Some stories are too good to be true. Others, evidently, are too good to check.

Still, the flimsy report of Nixon’s “gay affair” went viral on the Internet last month after galleys were leaked ahead of the book’s release. When I asked Fulsom about the media reaction, he said that accounts describing his “explosive revelations” that Nixon “carried on a sizzling gay love affair” exaggerated his findings, and he admitted that, without any photos showing Nixon and Rebozo in flagrante delicto, there is “no evidence it actually happened.”

But he defended his sourcing: “As a reporter, it was my duty to convey everything I learned,” including “another layer, if it’s true, of a very complicated guy who was into duplicity like no one else.”

This is not, in short, the kind of documentation that would survive vetting in any top-tier newsroom, let alone pass scholarly muster in a serious history journal.

Nixon is just the latest target of what writer Joyce Carol Oates has called “pathography” — a biographical genre devoted to digging up dirt. It’s the literary opposite of hagiography, which glorifies and celebrates its subject. Pathography’s “motifs are dysfunction and disaster, illness and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct,” Oates noted in 1988. “Its scenes are sensational, wallowing in squalor and foolishness; its dominant images are physical and deflating.”

America’s uncontested queen of pathography is Kitty Kelley, the best-selling muckraker of celebrities and political figures (or both, as when she implied, but failed to prove, that first lady Nancy Reagan had a sexual liaison with Frank Sinatra in the White House, a claim the Reagans denied).