The internet in the early 2000s, with its dial-up connections, crowded homepages, and a few people who really thought blogging could make a difference, seems almost nostalgic. One of them was Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr. He was born in Miami to Cuban parents and grew up in Little Havana. He went to an all-boys Catholic prep school and then to NYU to study acting, but his career never quite took off. The next part is what no one saw coming.
He wrote a blog. He said himself that he did it because it looked easy. Part of what makes the Perez Hilton phenomenon so interesting to look back on is how it all began. For the most part, PerezHilton.com didn’t start out with a big idea. The Insider called the website, which was called PageSixSixSix.com at the time, “Hollywood’s Most-Hated Website” just six months after it launched. The server crashed from all the people using it. That kind of attention, even bad attention, can build up and fuel itself.
What Perez Hilton did wasn’t just talk about other people. It was gossip with a person’s name on it, and it was clearly his name. Putting captions and cartoonish drawings on paparazzi pictures was something he did. He liked some things. He had grudges. He said he was friends with Paris Hilton, who eventually gave him her last name as a stage name. Early on, critics noticed that the way he wrote about her was much kinder than the way he wrote about, say, Vanessa Hudgens or Taylor Momsen. It’s still a good question whether that was biased or just honest fandom. Most likely both.
Hilton said in July 2007 that his site had more than 8.8 million page views in a single day. A lot of people didn’t agree with those numbers, but the cultural impact was real. It is said that the singer Fergie called him out in a song. On Twitter, Miley Cyrus said what was bothering her. There were big moments here. They were proof that a blogger who worked out of what he called “his closet studio” knew how to get close to the world’s most famous people.
Hilton did some things that don’t hold up well over time. His past habit of bringing up supposedly hidden celebrities got him a lot of bad press, which was fair. In 2007, he was also made fun of for saying that Fidel Castro had died before it was official, even though no major news organization confirmed the claim. He later said that was his “one regret” on TV for the whole country. There’s something honest about saying it out loud, even if it was years later.
Hilton himself changed over time, which may be the most surprising plot twist. By 2012, he was on Oprah’s Lifeclass with Deepak Chopra, talking about a “spiritual awakening” and moving away from the persona that made him famous: criticizing celebrities. That reinvention stuck, whether it was real or planned. He started appearing in more types of media, like books, podcasts, YouTube, reality TV, and even off-Broadway theater. It was BroadwayWorld in 2018 that called him “the original celebrity social media influencer.” It’s simple to counter that description and also simple to defend it.
It looks very different now from the landscape he helped make. Every famous person has a relationship with millions of people who follow them. There is gossip all the time and everywhere. Compared to that, the blogger with the doodled tabloid photos feels very old-fashioned. There is, however, a clear link between what Hilton did in 2005 and the influencer economy that rules digital media today. He was building his personal brand long before that was a thing. Before there were platforms to reward opinion on a large scale, he was making money off of it.
