I left Perez Hilton’s name out of the title and subtitle of this article on purpose. Nobody wants my amateurish take on his self-harm video this week. And yet that is exactly what this post is going to be about.
I should add up front that I’m not the right person to write about any of this. I was never fluent in pop culture, and despite being around in the 2000s, I missed most of Perez’s career. I must have been distracted. But I made the mistake of watching a few seconds of that horrific video, and it has stayed with me all week. Like Sophie Gilbert pointed out in The Atlantic, many of us are still in shock.
This also falls a bit within this newsletter’s purview. Perez Hilton is, after all, a famous gay man, and you can be sure our enemies will read his downfall through that lens.
It feels personal, too. He is my age, 48. Like me, he built his family through surrogacy. And much of what I write about here is, at bottom, about the pursuit of happiness for LGBTQ+ people—not simply our right to exist, marry, work, or raise families, but our ability to build lives in which we can actually be happy.
That is the question Perez’s public mental health crisis has put before us, rather brutally.
Almost everyone I spoke with this week processed the story through the lens of karma. Indeed, Hilton spent the 2000s making a career out of other people’s humiliation, and now his own was being broadcast for everyone to see. But if karma really governed American public life, Washington would be one long mental health crisis—which, as I write this, I realize may not be the best counterargument.
The line between what is uniquely Perez Hilton’s and what is painfully familiar to gay life is actually murkier. Some aspects of his story are unfortunately too prevalent in our community:
Body dysmorphia. The video has a subtext around his fraught relationship with his own appearance. Perez has spoken publicly about his weight, has visibly altered his appearance through cosmetic procedures, and has long seemed intensely preoccupied with how he looks. That, too, has a distinctly gay resonance: the seductive idea that if only we were thinner, younger, more muscular, more masculine, we might be worthy of desire — and, perhaps, of love.
The inside job. Hilton got the fame he wanted, the money he wanted, and the family he wanted, and neither seems to have brought him peace. It’s very reminiscent of “best little boy in the world” syndrome — the compulsion to out-achieve your way into being lovable, which only ever produces more achievement, never more love.
Loneliness, and the “bitchy gay” legacy. As I wrote recently in Our Own Private Loneliness Epidemic, it’s easy to blame ourselves for being lonely. And Hilton certainly played a gigantic part in his own isolation. But he’s also a caricature of an archetype our culture has long celebrated: the bitter, bitchy gay man who builds walls of sarcasm around himself so he cannot get hurt. When I came out in the early 2000s, that persona was still very much a live brand — almost a rite of passage. We built an entire comic sensibility around our wound, which of course never healed.
The spiritual gap. It’s no coincidence that in the weeks before this livestream, Hilton had begun talking publicly about the Bible. At our lowest points, spirituality is often the raft people reach for — and it remains, for so many queer people, just out of reach. Of everything straight people have done to their gay children, exiling them from spiritual community may be the least forgivable and the most damaging.
Every one of these lenses rests on the same old premise: that being gay and being happy are fundamentally incompatible. Robert Moore’s line from The Boys in the Band has outlived its moment for a reason: “Show me a happy homosexual, and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”
I should mention that I know many happy LGBTQ+ people. I also know far too many who have killed themselves, in one way or another. What often seems to separate those trajectories is some combination of a strong family and/or community connection, a socioeconomic leg up, and a great deal of intentionality: making the effort to stay connected, confronting maladaptive behaviors, and seeking mental health care. Because, ultimately, internalized stigma, which is a social determinant of mental health, on par with poverty or discrimination in its measurable effects, must be addressed at some point.
God knows that in America, depression isn’t unique to LGBTQ+ people. A 2025 estimate put SSRI use specifically at roughly 16.6% of adults.
And very little help is coming from the government. RFK Jr. has launched a push this year to curb what he calls the “overprescription” of antidepressants — an effort that, whatever its intent, treats the medication as the disease rather than as the symptom of one. I used to tell a friend in Congress that happiness has become a political question in America. Whether our way of life is conducive to happiness, and what we can do about it, is urgent. And yet our politicians have been unable to articulate even the beginning of an answer, probably because it has economic ramifications.
Within that picture, sexual-minority adults consistently appear at elevated rates. Studies usually find that gay and lesbian adults are twice as likely as heterosexuals to be on antidepressant medication, alongside higher treatment rates for anxiety and mood disorders across the board. So it could be that as many as 34% of LGBTQ+ people are on antidepressants. This, of course, does not include all those who, without access to healthcare, self-medicate in one way or another.
All of the lenses I listed - dysmorphia, materialism, isolation, spiritual exile all played some part in Perez's story, and in many of our stories. But naming the pattern isn’t the same as addressing it. If our community is genuinely struggling with mental health at this scale, charting a path toward happier lives has to become a real priority for us — maybe even ahead of legal rights or economic power, since neither of those guarantees the other.
Some of that work is symbolic: more LGBTQ+ role models who model happiness, not just success. But most of it has to be concrete—real investment in community centers, LGBTQ+-affirming elder housing, twelve-step programs, mental health care, and peer support. Perez Hilton may not have been the person we would have chosen to teach us this lesson. But his very public unraveling is a painful reminder that our collective mental health—and not just our rights, visibility, or economic power—must become a priority for our community.
If this piece brought up anything difficult for you, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is free, confidential, and available by call or text, 24/7.
Written by someone who has clearly done some inner work! Well Done! I wish I met you when u lived here in DC!
Excellent post. I agree; naming it is useful, but most of us already recognize it by now. Putting more effort into connection, like community, spiritual space, real peer support - the unglamorous stuff - is a harder task we keep skipping.