Luke Ford spends most of his time around porn stars, but he has a crush on Wendy Shalit, the neocon ingenue author of “A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue.” Last time we talked, he had passed the afternoon skinny-dipping with X-rated actresses Kendra Jade and Shelle Pearson, but he was still mooning over a recent encounter with the poster girl for virtue and virginity. “Published in Commentary at only 19,” he said dreamily. “I was really curious to see what she looked like, so I went to her reading. She’s a little cutie, I kind of fancied her. I think we’d make a good couple — Miss Modesty and Mr. Pornography.”

He’s not kidding. Ford, one of the most controversial figures in the porn universe, is a man torn between twin obsessions — hardcore sex and conservative Judaism. He has elevated moral and spiritual schizophrenia to surreal proportions, and the split is most obvious in the two Web sites that he spends his life running. On Lukeford.com, he operates as the Matt Drudge of the triple-X industry, tirelessly reporting scandals, news, gossip, innuendo and minutia, earning $42,000 a year in ad revenue and the loathing of most of porn’s major players. In his spare time, though, the sex industry’s most notorious muckraker — and the son, bizarrely, of a Seventh Day Adventist evangelical preacher — maintains dennisprager.net, a site devoted to conservative writer, Jewish theologian and right-wing radio host Dennis Prager.

“I view porn, adultery, premarital sex, all forms of sexual expression outside of marriage as sinful, meaning against God’s will,” says Ford, a wry, blandly handsome 33-year-old. “Let me stress that I am single, I have never been married and the Lord has not granted me the gift of chastity. I do not fool myself that what I’m doing is OK by God or my religion. I’m really open that these are the ideals I believe in and in various ways I do not live up to them. C’est la vie. I get therapy once or twice a week for 90 minutes a session.” He’s a hypocrite and he knows it, revels in it — in fact, Ford is so blunt about his personal shortcomings he disarms criticism by cheerfully concurring with everything his enemies say about him.

And they say a lot, because as much as the biz hates to admit it, everyone in the adult film world reads him. “You can’t find someone in this business who’s never heard of Luke Ford,” says Atlanta pornographer Mike South, one of the few people in the sex industry to count Ford as a friend. “Luke has done more research into this business than most of the people who lived through it in the ’70s and ’80s. If there is a Matt Drudge in the porn industry it is Luke Ford, hands down. He’s very similar to Matt Drudge — he came out of nowhere and created a name for himself in a very short time. The difference is that Luke may even be more vicious than Matt Drudge is.”

Indeed, Ford’s methods are slash and burn, often mean-spirited and journalistically dubious. His Web site is an odd melange of rambling daily reports on the shenanigans of actresses, directors and producers, exposés on industry corruption, torturous self-analysis, satire — and lots of naked pictures. Also included are capsule biographies of nearly everyone who’s ever taken his or her clothes off in front of a camera and Ford’s own take on every issue related to the business, from child porn and bestiality to industry racism and mob involvement.

In one of his most notorious assaults on the business, Ford published a list that contains the real names of over 300 porn people, a list that has sabotaged the attempts of some to build a life after porn. Brandy Alexandre, for example, left porn in 1992. A few months ago, she was fired from her job as a senior secretary with Forest Lawn cemeteries after someone who had seen Luke’s list outed her to her boss.

Ford’s profile in the business really skyrocketed last year, though, when he broke the story about porn star Mark Wallice being HIV-positive. Like Matt Drudge’s early stories of Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress, at first Ford’s reports were taken as evidence that he had become a dangerously irresponsible rumor-monger. At one point, after enduring vociferous criticism from the industry, Ford even apologized to Wallice.

Four months later, Wallice tested positive — under mounting pressure, a colleague had dragged him to the clinic. To this day, many in the industry claim that Ford got lucky — that just because the story was true doesn’t mean he was right to publish it without hard evidence. “Just because he turned out to be right that time is no reason to applaud him as a great reporter,” says Alexandre. Ford himself says he had no way to be absolutely sure about the story when it ran — “I just had so many sources that told me he was positive that I took a chance and went with it.” Either way, Wallice had been regularly working without showing his test, and by reporting the story Ford caused the truth to come out. He may have saved lives.

Last month Ford published his first book, “A History of X,” which is, as he readily admits, a mess, a rambling and formless account that attempts to squeeze 100 years of sex on film into 232 pages. Huge dramas are condensed into a few sentences. Relating one of the biggest scandals in porn history, he simply writes: “In 1991, Jim Mitchell, frustrated by his brother’s erratic ways, murdered Artie. He then hired a clever lawyer who bamboozled judge and jury into a ‘voluntary manslaughter’ conviction carrying a maximum punishment of six years in prison. After serving three years, Jim was released in 1997.” End of story.

Ford insists that the reason the book is so bad is because his publisher, Prometheus Books, made him chop it from 1,000 pages to its current length (largely for legal reasons). One is tempted to dismiss this as a self-serving rationalization, but South, who saw the original draft, backs up Ford’s account. Nevertheless, the book is suffused with Ford’s trademark sarcastic contempt, making it frequently amusing. He deadpans, “Meyer was not the type of guy who reduced women to their tits. ‘I’ve had more than my share of ass,’ says Meyer.” He relishes recounting the shattered dreams of porn actresses, like the story of Marilyn Chambers (whom he calls by her real name, Marilyn Briggs) and her blown shot at a Hollywood career. “She later moved to Los Angeles, where an important producer offered her a deal: He’d provide her with an apartment, car, acting lessons, spending money, roles in major films and career guidance in exchange for Briggs being his mistress. Not wanting to be tied down to an old man with a big paunch, she rejected his offer. On his way out the door, the shocked producer told Briggs that she’d never make it in the biz. He was right. Briggs never succeeded in mainstream entertainment.” The book is often a jeremiad against the business disguised as a behind-the-scenes history — though, to be fair, Ford also debunks certain stories that have bedeviled the business, including the myth of snuff films (he says they don’t exist) and Linda Lovelace’s insistence that she made “Deep Throat” under threat of violence (no one present on the set corroborates her account).

It’s startling, given Ford’s blatant hostility toward porn, that anyone in the industry talks to him. The fascinating thing about Ford, though, is that he’s so charming that even those who have every reason to despise him are often won over when they’re in his presence. Ford has the gift of making you feel like you alone, of all the idiots in the world, really get it, are really on his wavelength. “Last year I was at [the Adult Video News Awards],” says South. “I was talking to a lady in the business. She had never met Luke, and she wanted to know who he was because she was livid about something he put on his site about her. Luke comes up, I introduce them, and she immediately goes into a very obvious attack mode. Within two minutes she’s sitting in Luke’s lap.”

The lady? Alexandre, who still maintains friendly relations with him. “Personally, on a one-to-one level I talk to him every now and again, but on a professional level I hate his guts,” she says. “He’s one of those angst-ridden guys that draws women in. They want to ease his suffering. He might lay on the charm to get people to open up — we good-looking people use that all the time. The problem is he turns around and hurts people with it.”

“He’s essentially an unhappy person based on the work that he does,” Alexandre continues. “In one breath he embraces the industry because it supports him, and in the other breath he shuns it. He hates it but he needs it, and whatever the need is based on only he and his psychiatrist know. But he is nice, soft-spoken and friendly.” Adds Paul Fishbein, the publisher of the industry trade magazine Adult Video News, “He’s a really charming, nice guy when you meet him and talk to him, but he’s not trustworthy.” At one point, Fishbein considered hiring Ford. Now he’s considering suing him. “He’ll print anything, anything anyone tells him. He says things like, ‘I heard that Metro Home Video threatened to pull all their advertising’ — if we didn’t put all their girls on stage [at the Adult Video News Awards] and give their videos better reviews — ‘so Paul Fishbein acquiesced.’ I had to threaten him with a libel suit. Luke Ford is interesting, but he screwed me.”

Besides being charming, Luke Ford is also smart, though he believes he’s not as smart as he used to be. Ford was an economics major at UCLA in 1988 when he grew ill with chronic fatigue syndrome, the amorphous sickness once dubbed yuppie flu. In an e-mail that Ford posted to his site, his sister apologizes to the world for her brother by attributing his odd proclivities to his long illness.

“In the mid-eighties he contracted glandular fever, which wiped out his energy and therefore his activity,” she writes. “It is accepted by medical science that glandular fever, caused by the Epstein Barr virus, is often followed by depression. What still remains controversial is the diagnostic entity chronic fatigue syndrome. But whatever the label I saw my brother slide from an energetic and fun loving boy to an invalid … Luke in some ways is not the boy he used to be. He seems to lack a degree of insight and balance in his life. I suspect he does not feel the tension which exists between being involved in pornography and gossip associated with that industry on the one hand and his religious beliefs on the other. He was brought up in a very balanced, loving and Christian family. His involvement in pornography is heartbreaking to us.”