Barry Diller is finally ready to tell the truth—and name names.
Keep up with the latest in LGBTQ+ news and politics. Sign up for The Advocate's email newsletter.
In his new memoir titled Who Knew, the 83-year-old billionaire media mogul and longtime husband of fashion icon Diane von Furstenberg confirms what had long been whispered about in Hollywood: that he is gay (or, as he puts it, “bi with Di”). And in typical Diller fashion, he isn’t holding much back.
Michael Bennett, the late Broadway legend behind A Chorus Line, and Joe Holland, Johnny Carson’s stepson, who died of AIDS in 1994, are among the men he reportedly had relationships with. Diller, who’s been with von Furstenberg for nearly 50 years, toldThe New York Times he never talked about his private life publicly out of fear rather than shame.
“I was just too chicken to tell anyone anything,” he admitted. “It’s a guilt that will never leave me.”
On CBS Sunday Morning, he described first realizing he was gay at age 11 and sneaking off to the Beverly Hills Public Library in search of books on homosexuality. “Everything I read was, like, horrible,” he said. “And I got on my bike and rode home and thought, ‘I’m a condemned person.’”
He and von Furstenberg married in 2001, after decades of a love story that began with desire and settled into a deep, unconventional partnership. They’ve even famously lived in separate residences for much of their marriage.
“I don’t see anything mutually exclusive with that,” he said of loving her while also being attracted to men.
While von Furstenberg was the only woman he’s ever been with, he writes that his interest in men never went away—and he spent years compartmentalizing that side of himself, afraid it would ruin him professionally.
“I wanted to tell the story,” Diller said, “and I knew if I told the story, I had to tell the truth.”
Diller’s coming-out moment may have arrived late in life, but it lands in a cultural moment that’s increasingly embracing nuance over labels. Still, he’s candid about what his silence cost him, and what it may have cost others. “I should have been a role model, for whatever good that might have done for others,” he writes. “I was wrong.”
Who Knew hits shelves May 20.
