There are a lot of us who got into this business because of Kiki Drunkst. LOLHan. The fantasy of drawing a penis on the head of a young celebrity who definitely didn’t deserve the cruelty.
That’s the thing, though. The age of Perez Hilton wasn’t, at the time, defined by the vileness we know it to be now. It was mischievous. It was FUN. It was the Wild West version of the internet at the time, navigating how to be the new pop-culture arbiters, taking the rich and famous down a peg and holding them to account.
Reducing a celebrity to their worst was a hilarious passion. Ruining lives was a lark. It was the highest-profile version of internet anonymity, even if you were a high-profile blogger whose site was dictating the direction of culture. There are no ramifications, because it’s the internet! It’s not real!
The reality of what that perspective, which, whether or not we’ll admit, so many of us foamed at the mouth to engage in, came to a jarring confrontation this week.
It’s easy to dismiss or ridicule Perez Hilton because we’re more enlightened now and understand what his contribution to the toxicity of celebrity surveillance was. We know now…from our vantage point 20 years later, as if we weren’t complicitly engaging with that content. And it’s from this vantage point that we are witnessing this new, horrifying update in the life and career of Hilton: the TikTok video of him self-harming.
Maybe this is where we were always headed. The man who pioneered our vulturistic need to turn any celebrity interaction, from a grocery-store run to a first kiss, into emergency content. Before he was pushed out by the content system he basically created. Now, he is the emergency. And the reason is so upsetting.
If you or a loved one is struggling with suicidal thoughts, please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing or texting 988.
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