BY: DAIMAN TEER for THE SIMPLETON STAR
There are people who become famous because they can sing. There are people who become famous because they can act. There are people who become famous because they can write, paint, perform, entertain or do something that ordinary people cannot do. And then there was Perez Hilton.
Perez Hilton became famous because he looked at people who were actually famous and made fun of them.
That was the business.
He was not a great writer. He was not a great actor. He was not a great entertainer. He was a guy with a computer, an enormous appetite for celebrity gossip and an apparently bottomless supply of resentment toward people who had something he did not have. He took photographs of attractive, successful people, scribbled insults on them and discovered that there was a fortune to be made by being the obnoxious little bastard standing outside the party screaming through the window.
And Hollywood loved to hate him.
For a while, Perez Hilton was everywhere. His website became a phenomenon. He was invited onto television. Celebrities knew his name. People who had never heard of Mario Lavandeira knew exactly who Perez Hilton was. He had achieved the great internet trick of turning absolutely nothing into something because enough people were willing to look at it.
But there was always a funny little problem with Perez.
He wanted desperately to be one of the people he mocked.
That is what made the whole thing so pathetic. Perez Hilton was never really interested in celebrity because he was fascinated by celebrity. He was fascinated by celebrity because he wanted some for himself.
And he got some.
Just not enough.
The years passed. The celebrity gossip business changed. The internet changed. Social media changed everything. Suddenly celebrities could bypass people like Perez Hilton and speak directly to millions of people without having to wait for some gossip blogger to decide whether they were worthy of attention.
And Perez began to fade.
There is nothing particularly unusual about fading. Almost everybody does it. The difference is that most people understand that fame has a shelf life. Perez Hilton apparently never received the memo.
So he kept going.
He changed his appearance. He lost weight. He worked on his face. He reinvented himself. He kept producing content. He kept trying to remain part of the conversation. But there is a point in every celebrity’s life when the audience begins to look somewhere else, and no amount of frantic waving can make them turn around.
Perez Hilton had spent years teaching America that attention was everything.
Then America stopped paying attention.
That must have been difficult for a man whose entire career had been constructed around being noticed.
And now, suddenly, Perez Hilton is being noticed again.
On August 4, Hilton appeared on a TikTok livestream in a deeply disturbing incident that resulted in police responding to his Miami-Dade home and Hilton being hospitalized. His family has said that he remains hospitalized in serious but stable condition and will require surgery.
I am not going to pretend that the incident itself is entertainment. It isn’t.
But there is an extraordinary irony in the fact that a man who spent his professional life turning other people’s lives into public spectacles has now become a spectacle himself.
Perez Hilton spent years looking for the camera.
He finally found it.
The sad joke is that after all these years, the camera may be the only thing that still remembers who he is.
Perez Hilton wanted to be famous. He wanted to be important. He wanted to sit at the table with the people whose photographs he mocked and whose careers he picked apart.
But there is a difference between being famous and being somebody.
Perez Hilton became famous.
He never became somebody.
And that is the part that must really sting.
THE BIBLE VERSE
“For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
Galatians 6:7
WHY I CHOSE THIS VERSE
Perez Hilton spent years sowing ridicule, humiliation and contempt. He made a business out of finding the flaws in other people and putting them on display for an audience. Whether or not a person believes that God keeps score, the principle is hard to miss. Eventually, every man has to live with what he has made of himself.
LET US PRAY
Lord, look with mercy upon Perez Hilton.
He has spent much of his life making sport of other people, and perhaps he has never understood what that says about the man doing the mocking. Give him whatever strength, wisdom and humility he may still be capable of finding. If there is something in him worth saving, save it.
And remember the people he has mocked, humiliated and wounded along the way. Give them the peace he so often denied them and the grace to leave his cruelty behind.
We ask this in Your name.
Amen.
