Perez Hilton has expressed regret for his past habit of outing celebrities who were keeping their sexuality private.
The US blogger has released a new memoir titled TMI: My Life in Scandal, which details his 16 years as a celebrity gossip writer.
Hilton, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira, was notorious in the Noughties for his practise of outing stars including singer Clay Aiken, and N’Sync member Lance Bass.
“I regret that I thought it was OK to out celebrities,” Hilton writes in his book. “That is something I no longer believe.”
Hilton, who is gay himself, received death threats from fans when he outed Aiken, a former American Idol contestant.
However, he reveals that it was the It Gets Better campaign that supported LGBT+ teenagers, launched by activist Dan Savage in 2010, that provided a wake-up call.
Hilton recorded a message for the campaign, only to face an instant backlash for his perceived hypocrisy.
“The response I got truly shook me to my core,” he told the BBC. “Almost every comment said, 'You're a hypocrite, you're a bully, you're part of the problem.' I knew a lot of people didn't like me before then, but I was living in my own little bubble.”
Hilton said he had “brainwashed” himself into distancing his work from his personal life, and viewed Perez as “a character”.
“I reached a point in my private life where I started having these thoughts about changing. But I was paralysed by fear, that I would lose everything that I had worked very hard to achieve up until that point,” he said.
“Over the last 10 years, it's been this ongoing process of making constant changes, finding out what the line is, and making mistakes along the way. I'm not perfect, I've had slip-ups, even in the last 10 years."
In the same memoir, Hilton alleges that Lady Gaga “used him as a tool” to write “terrible” things about her pop star rivals, including Christina Aguilera.
