Daily Archives: February 5, 2010

I hate Perez Hilton. I don’t believe for one minute that Hilton is gay. I think its a ruse to avoid the disdain he should get from people like me. He is a race baiting pimp that has had his 15 minutes of fame and needs to crawl back under the rock from whence he came. Ed.

Congratulations to gossip blogger Perez Hilton, whom Forbes has named as the biggest star on the web for the third year running. Were I to honour Perez in the style he has made his own, I would probably use Microsoft Paint to scrawl “no one cares fat whore” across a photo acquired by sticking a periscope up his trousers, but unfortunately we have yet to introduce that kind of functionality to the Guardian Comment pages. Still, give it time.

Perez, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira, beat luminaries such as the Twitter founders, causing some unfamiliar with his work to query whether he deserves the top spot. Agonisingly, I suspect he does. Just as there are ­wannabe wags – not wannabe Wags, the difference is crucial – currently joking that, as an aggressive, foul-mouthed cheat, John Terry is the perfect embodiment of English values, so it is tempting to think of Perez as the man for whom the internet was made.

Oh, I know they originally conceived the thing as a military tool or whatever, but that was merely a failure of imagination. The web has come into its own as a means of gambling, disseminating porn, and seeing whether Paris Hilton was wearing knickers last night; and though its founding fathers couldn’t have predicted their baby would turn out like this, it’s amazing how even an unpromising child can blossom. Britney Spears was the most searched name on the internet for the fourth year running in 2009, and if you like your upskirt shots of her augmented with the words “unfit mother”, Perez was the place to go.

For those unfamiliar with his shtick, that’s about the size of it, and in its early years I suppose this would have been characterised as its charm. Even Britney used to wear T-shirts advertising the site. It had the flavour of a cheeky outsider pressing his nose against the window of a Hollywood party that was taking itself rather too seriously, panting a while, then writing rude words in the condensation its breath left behind.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact point at which Perez passed through that window, but passed through it he most certainly has. He appears in music videos and on celebrity reality shows. He co-hosted the MTV Europe music awards, and has been touting himself as a candidate to fill Simon Cowell’s soon-to-be vacated chair on American Idol.

In joining the throng of those he mocks, Perez Hilton has completed the transformation from blogger to satirical character – a sort of demented cross between Charles Pooter and Kenneth Widmerpool. That he presents TV gigs in the manner of someone who has just won a competition to do so must be part of his appeal. The internet’s biggest star is a man who would trample over his grandmother to get inside the tent he was pissing into minutes before.

Least easy to swallow is his perverse morality, which manifests itself in his notorious policy of outing supposedly closeted celebrities (Hilton is gay ­himself), apparently to make the world a better place – as though interspersing such public service with upskirt pictures were in some way empowering to the gay community.

The absurdity of his position was crystallised when he picked a fight with Will.i.am, calling the Black Eyed Peas star what the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation subsequently asked the media to refer to as the F-word. A smack from the band’s manager was allegedly forthcoming; Perez later admitted that he had ­considered using the N-word. His reaction to his public rebuke was to post comically self-regarding screeds, characterised by statements such as “I am saddened Glaad chose to victimise me further by criticising me”.

Even for someone who clearly couldn’t give a toss whether something is true or not, some of his big calls have been unfortunate. Fidel Castro still lives, and in retrospect, reacting to breaking news that Michael Jackson had suffered a heart attack by dismissing it as a publicity stunt was probably the wrong way to go. “Either he’s lying or making himself sick … We’re dubious!!”

“We”, however, sail on regardless, only accruing more visitors and watching as what used to be called the mainstream media waddle dutifully behind (I’m still spellbound that last year the Daily Telegraph ran his story that Michelle Obama was pregnant). Yet increasingly, that old mainstream media/blogger distinction seems outmoded.

It’s surely time to bury the lie that super-bloggers such as Perez are in some way outsiders. He may care to style himself as a renegade – the John Rambo of gossip – but the fact is, Perez is now as insider as they come. All pseudo-dissidents go establishment in the end. Once-idealistic rock stars buy country piles and whinge about paying tax, the likes of Perez start taking the freebies and decline to call Paris Hilton out for homophobic remarks because she buys him off with access.

Anointed by Forbes, cravenly courted, endlessly imitated – we must face the fact that Perez is more mainstream than the floundering mainstream media. Drawing sperm dots dripping out of the corner of Jennifer Aniston’s mouth is now the norm; everything else is beginning to look kinda fringe.