Perez Hilton: a day late and a dollar short

(This is the Online column, written for The Southland Times)

So what’s up with celebrity blogger and “I’’m currently having my 15 minutes of fame” wannabe celeb Perez Hilton?

There was a time when I visited his site daily and thoroughly enjoyed his wee snippets of gossip. Not so much now, though.

Instead of the quickfire, breaking gems of bitchiness we used to get, Hilton seems to be a day late and a dollar short much of the time.

Over the past few months I’ve noticed that more and more often the bigger stories the self-proclaimed queen of all media talks about on his blog are a day or three old and I’ve already read them on some of the other celebrity gossip sites I visit (oh, come on, don’t look at me like that who doesn’t like a wee spot of Hollywood dirty laundry?)

They are also often better written and a whole lot more insightful elsewhere.

What’s happened Perez? You used to be funny and relevant but now it’s feeling more like bitter and envious.

Who or what rattled your cage when it came to Miley Cyrus, teeny-bopper extraordinaire? I’m as likely as the next bitchy person to have a crack about her bubblegum music but you’ve taken it a whole lot further, dubbing the 16-year-old Slutty Cyrus, and, of course, the fact that her recent boyfriend and underwear model Justin Gaston is 20 years old seems to have taken your usual bubbly excitement and raised it a notch.

Interestingly, when Cyrus made a comment in support of gay marriage, Hilton suddenly turned down the heat on the child (yes Perez, she’s a child, and if she happened to be my child, I’d be spectacularly peeved at the trash you have written about her). While I fully agree on the whole gay marriage thing (it’s the 21st century, how can we deny basic rights to one sector of society based on nothing more than sexual orientation?), that shouldn’t have marked the turning point in how she was treated.

And speaking of gay, Hilton’s other recent obsession has been American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert. He’s taken every opportunity to point the finger at Lambert and accuse him of being a publicly closeted queer but I’m baffled as to just what that means. Surely if you’re in the closet you’re not public? And vice versa.

But I digress.

Hilton has worked himself into something of a lather since American Idol finished, demanding Lambert admit to being gay, that he officially come out of the closet. However, I’m pretty sure it was just Perez Hilton and a few middle-aged journalists who didn’t realise Lambert was already well and truly out of the closet.

So keen was Hilton to trash Lambert, he latched on to a story about how Lambert had turned into a bit of a diva since the Idol final and took great relish in giving him an online bitch-slapping. Fair enough, you might say, but later that same day he posted about the story again, this time admitting the whole rumour had been started by fans of another Idol runner-up from a few years back. No apology to Lambert, though.

So what’s up there Perez? Why are you such an angry young blogger when it comes to Adam Lambert? Did he turn you down?

Anyway, I’m sure Hilton will sleep better tonight now that Lambert’s sexuality has been officially addressed in this month’s Rolling Stone magazine (and for the three people who hadn’t worked it out, yes he is).