Ability to query_posts for a certain posts status

I’d really like to be able to separate private posts from public posts. I thought I’d leave index.php to display public posts, and make a page which only shows private posts.

Except that query_posts(“status=private”) does nothing about it.

Sure, I can emulate the behaviour with a completely custom query, but I lose out on a lot of goodies it seems, such as automatic splitting on pages according to how many posts/page I’ve set up.

Can I use query_posts() with post status? If not, it would make for a nice addition.