When Renee Zellweger got her marriage to Kenny Chesney annulled at the end of 2005 because of 'fraud', people mostly assumed that she meant the pink shirt-wearing cowboy enjoyed man-on-man bum-boinking more than any Zellweger love.

It's now been 14 whole months since Renee Zellweger ditched Kenny Chesney, called him a fraud and returned to making lah-di-dah films about fat women with plummy British accents – so long, in fact, that most people had entirely forgotten about the whole mess – but only now has Kenny Chesney decided to speak out and declare that he is not even the slightest bit gay. And to prove how entirely un-gay he is, Kenny Chesney has announced a David Blaine-style stunt where he'll glass a queer in a pub carpark before going home to watch 12 hours of WWE wrestling and listen to some Oasis music.

Back in 2005 Renee Zellweger was the talk of the town when she suddenly decided to get married to Kenny Chesney, the rootin'-tootin' cowboy singer of such hits as Being Drunk's A Lot Like Loving You and From Hillbilly Heaven To Honky Tonk Hell who was entirely unknown to the percentage of the world that doesn't drive a truck or sit on its porch shooting at passers-by with a shotgun. But the love between Renee Zellweger and Kenny Chesney quickly turned sour, and four months later Renee and Kenny had their marriage annulled, with Renee Zellweger ticking the annulment box marked 'fraud'.

This news set the world alight – by which we mean Michael Douglas referred to it in a drunken-seeming interview once – and long after the annulment was rubberstamped, the 'fraud' word kept cropping up. Renee Zellweger has kept a dignified silence on the matter, save for a weird outburst about a gun, and while Kenny Chesney seemed keen to keep publicly reassuring people that he was OK and that he had no regrets, he never actually explained what 'fraud' meant. Obviously, people assumed, it meant that he was gayer than a packet of biscuits. Although it's thought that Kenny Chesney was aware of these gay rumours, he never passed comment.

Until now, that is. Seemingly fed-up that Keith Urban has stolen his crown of actress-marrying cowboy du jour with his fancy rehab stint and website tantrums, Kenny Chesney has decided to dredge the whole issue back up again during an interview with 60 Minutes where he explains that 'fraud' doesn't actually mean 'gay', as E! Online reports:

"It's not true. Period. Maybe I should have come out and said, 'No, I'm not [gay],' but I didn't want to draw any more attention to it. I didn't have to prove to anybody that I wasn't [gay]. I didn't feel like I really did… The only fraud that was committed was me thinking that I knew what it was like… that I really understood what it was like to be married, and I really didn't." 

So that's the end of that. Renee Zellweger can go back to making films about posh people talking to geese and Kenny Chesney can go back to reasserting how butch and heterosexual he is by singing songs about how sexy he thinks rain is. The only losers here are country and western fans, who are all famously conscientious, open-minded and deeply pro-gay. Ahem.

Read more:

Kenny Chesney: Fraud, Yes; Gay, No – E! Online