Pereznnial Horror

When I got sober 10 years ago, and hobbled into a 12 step meeting with a broken nose, two black eyes and enough martyrdom to power a dam, I had no idea that in a decade I’d be spending that anniversary avoiding a video of Perez Hilton stabbing himself on TikTok Live. TikTok wasn’t even a thing when I got sober. It launched a month later in September of 2016, but even then I was still mourning Vine. The future and all of its horrible things were happening fast. But that August, the only thing I could focus on was sending a photo of yogurt to my sponsor each morning to prove I was eating breakfast and not starving myself all day till I blacked out at night and binged on junk food from the gas station across the street from where I lived in Williamsburg. I was begging my insides for forgiveness after years of boiling them with drugs and alcohol into an inedible stew. Eventually, they did. We made peace.

I definitely wasn’t thinking about Perez Hilton in 2016. But now I am. This Ringu-ass video is following me around without me having even seen it. I feel like I can only hold out for so long before it gets me. Before it infects my system. It feels like COVID in March of 2020, when it felt like only interesting or worldly people got it. I held on for another two years before I officially tested positive, something that made me feel both proud and also sad.

Regardless, it caught up to me. It always does. You can’t outrun fate. And this video of Perez Hilton covered in blood and waiting for the police to arrive to his presumably weird Miami house to intervene is my destiny. I don’t care for Perez Hilton. The opposite, actually. I can’t hate someone I don’t know, other than a few people, and giving him that much brain power feels like an affront to my own intelligence and integrity. I can say without a shred of doubt that I don’t like him. In fact, I’d go as far as to say he’s one of the worst homosexual ambassadors our community has had over the last few decades. In the last decade, he’s been surpassed by a few others, mostly out of their technological potential to annihilate humanity and democracy. But his low vibrational impact on pop culture is no small feat. To put it simply, Perez Hilton is an evil faggot. The lowest of the low. The kind whose hatred towards women and desire to inflict pain on other queers feels supernatural.

That said, I don’t want him to kill himself, or hurt himself, or rub his own blood all over his face and body like Arnold Schwarzenegger with mud at the end of Predator. It is nothing I wish on anyone, evil people included. Evil people who spent years terrorizing famous women with Microsoft Paint-drawn cocks and cum drips and tears and outing gay actors and selling t-shirts on his website after Heath Ledger died with “Why Couldn’t It Be Britney?” printed on them. The website that I regretfully frequented in my daily devotion to the celebrity quasar occurring in the salad days of Audrina Partridge’s Los Angeles.

If I had to be technical, I’d call myself a DListed Gay, first and foremost. Where DListed was a joy to read, Perez Hilton felt compulsive. I simply had to look. I had to take it in. I was part of the problem. I was giving him clicks. I helped him make his millions. Michael K used DListed to satirize celebrity with heart and self-deprecation. And most importantly, it was funny. Genuinely hilarious. You can’t fake funny! Perez’s takedowns, alleged to be comedy, were the opposite. Loud cruelty does not a comedian make. More than that, though, it felt like he was quenching a genuine blood thirst. I can armchair analyze him and say he was suffering the same velvet rage churning inside me and every other gay. He wanted to unleash the seismic pain inside him upon the world. His savviness at early social media gave him the means to crop dust society with his wretchedness. That might be giving him too much credit. He’s just mean.

I’m not giving any of us much credit, either. Perez’s brand of fuckery didn’t take much to catch on. It was contagious, triggering a perma-latent virus inside all of us. It was the beginning of the internet, the real internet, where grossness is hurled into the dark with ease. Regardless of our collective accountability in the glitzy pageant of smoldering misogyny and homophobia at that particular time, Perez enjoyed hurting people. No reform in the wake of Tyler Clementi’s suicide, or turning over a new leaf in front of Ellen DeGeneres, or an alleged Sepsis-borne recommitment to Catholicism can erase that. Last month, he emerged from his newfound religious zeal and went on Sean Hannity’s podcast (of course) to reveal he’d made amends with Khloe Kardashian over Instagram DMs, and desired to apologize to others he had famously wronged, like Britney and Neil Patrick Harris. He also quoted some wisdom shared by Nick Cannon about “counsel culture.” Whatever that means.

Still, I was horrified to hear what had happened to him the other night. And horrified that one of my first thoughts was wondering if this was a ploy for sympathy. That’s probably on me for being a jaded hag. But his track record doesn’t serve him any good. Maybe I’m wrong. People can change, sure. I changed. If Perez was truly suffering from psychosis — something I, even in my worst mental anguish, have fortunately never endured, I have tremendous sympathy. I am glad he is not dead, and more importantly, I am glad his children weren’t present. May he be showered in God’s grace, etc.

There’s a world where his crash out, as the kids say, is eerily similar to the unspeakably tragic standoff at Britney’s home in 2008, where shortly after, paparazzi swallowed the ambulance transporting her to Cedars-Sinai.

But I’m not sure I can let him have that. That makes me feel guilty. Mostly everyone deserves a second chance, a clean slate. With him, it feels impossible. If it’s cosmic irony or not — a lesson he can learn. The worst, most gruesome moment of his life viewed by millions of people around the world. I don’t know, and I don’t think I want to know. Just like I don’t want to watch the video. I can’t see that. I know me, and I know I will obsess over the image of his blood-soaked face and wide eyes over and over until my brain launders it into the catalogue where all the other nightmare images I’ve seen on social media go when my psyche needs to dull their power for preservation. That doesn’t mean I don’t need to look. I feel compelled to. The night it happened, the same night I turned 10 in my recovery, I nearly had to throw my phone against the wall to keep myself from watching it before bed. I wish I’d had this same discipline when I leapt from my bed at close to midnight on a Thursday, after a friend texted me to come do MDMA with them, or when my dealer, who called me Corey — something I never corrected him on out of deluded reasoning that somehow, he would be so offended I never corrected him that he would no longer give me drugs — texted me that he was outside. That was 10 years ago, though. A different life. A different me.

I can’t have TikTok Live Perez in my head. I can’t look at my beautiful husband and our perfect dog after having glimpsed something so wretched. I have my priorities now. Priorities are hard won for me. I didn’t have them when I was loaded and high. I definitely had strategies, though. Strategies to ease my time-traveling journey into the void. Like alternating between the two liquor stores on my block so the same employees working at each wouldn’t see me every single day, or holding my arm up in the air while I was dancing at the rave so my phone would have reception for my dealer, or drunk dialing concerned friends or smoking cigarettes in bed and crying like I was Petra von Kant. Instead of custom frocks strewn across a white shag rug, I had Slim Jim wrappers under my bed and unopened bags of clothes my mom bought for me on Amazon piled up in my closet — clothes she believed, I assume, would cure me of the pain.