Billionaire Barry Diller comes out as gay in new memoirs
Millionaire Media Mogul Barry Diller, the subject of gay rumors, has been released in his new memoirs, RadarOnline.com can report.
The 83-year-old, who has been married to fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg for 24 years, insists that his love for her is still real.
Diller is a legendary media -Exec that previously served as CEO of Paramount and helped launch the FOX network. He opens about his homosexuality in his new memoirs, Who knew? – Part of it was reprinted in the New Yorker – And admits that his relationship with Von Furstenberg is ‘complex’.
“Although there have been many men in my life, there has only been one woman,” he writes. “And she didn’t come into my life until I was 33 years old.”
Diller and Von Furstenberg, 78, met each other in 1974, divorced in 1981, reunited in 1991 and married in 2001. As the businessman expresses it, the two “50 years with each other intertwined in a unique and complete love.”
He continues: “I have never questioned the basic authority of my sexuality in my life (I was only afraid of the reaction of others).
“And when my romance started with Diane, I never wondered that the biological necessity in his heterosexuality was just as strong as the opposite was. When it happened, my first reaction was” Who knew? “
When the two married for the first time, speculation was unbridled that the Union was only a way to reject the rumors about his sexuality.
“I am well aware that this part of my life has caused confusion and a lot of speculation,” he shares. “A relationship that started with indifference and then exploded in a romance that was so natural to us as breathing, surprised us and everyone else.
“It’s really the miracle of my life.”
Yet the rumors about Diller’s sexuality remained, even after their marriage. They were only fed by the famous gossip columnist Liz Smith, who once told The Hollywood Reporter That after David Geffen music head, revealed that he was gay in 1992, Diller asked her, “Do you think I should come out?”
Smith, who died in 2017 at the age of 94, replied: “No, Barry, David Geffen has to come out. He needs a big story or a scandal or a fight to push him into business and to make people afraid of him.”
She added: “People are already afraid of you. So what are you going to win? And too, you love women.”
In his book, Diller explains that he was “too scared” to get out earlier, although he knew he was not a good secret secret.
“I had so much early career success that you might have thought I had overcome what I saw as the greatest danger in my developing life,” he writes. “I had overcome other phobias, but fear of exposure still had a tyrannical grasp on me, so much so that it hinded every chance that I had a satisfactory personal life.
“Instead, I discovered that I could separate myself from everything that painful or frightening by simply locking it up, placing it in a distant box and hopefully never to deal with it.
“The compartmentalization of these unwanted feelings became so successful that it has since ruled and confused my life.”
