During his decades as a media mogul, Barry Diller has held an array of powerful titles, serving as chairman and chief executive of Fox, Paramount Pictures and, most recently, IAC. The positions have made Mr. Diller a boldfaced name and a billionaire.
Now, however, Mr. Diller, 83, has embraced a new role: that of an openly gay man.
The announcement came on Tuesday morning via an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir, “Who Knew,” published in New York magazine, which recounts his life, including his relationship with the designer and socialite Diane von Furstenberg, whom he has been married to since 2001.
“While there have been a good many men in my life, there has only ever been one woman,” Mr. Diller writes, calling his relationship with Ms. von Furstenberg “the miracle of my life,” despite it causing “confusion and lots of speculation.”
At the same time, Mr. Diller also writes of a quiet suffering he felt by hiding his sexuality, and a fear of exposure that “stunted any chance of my having a fulfilling personal life.”
He added that he “had discovered I could separate myself from anything painful or terrifying by just locking it away, putting it into a distant box and having to deal with it hopefully never.”
In the memoir, Mr. Diller says his early sexual experiences with men came during his teenage years “cruising in West Hollywood, darting in and out of side doors of bars along Melrose Avenue.”
“I never discussed my personal life, lowlight as it was, with anyone,” Mr. Diller writes, saying that despite suspicions about his sexuality, he “never wanted to make any declarations.”
“So many of us at that time were in this exiled state, so stunted in the way we lived,” he writes, adding that he “hated having to live a pretend life.”
Intent on keeping his “private life distinctly private,” as he put it, Mr. Diller says he came up with a series of rules — “my own personal bill of rights” — to guide his behavior and public persona, including living “with silence, but not with hypocrisy.”
“I wouldn’t do a single thing to make anyone believe I was living a heterosexual life,” he said. “I wouldn’t tell, and I wouldn’t allow myself to be asked.”
He added that he decided to “never bring a man as a date to a heterosexual event — not that there were many guys I was serious enough about to bring.”
“But I’d never bring a woman as a ‘beard,’ either,” he wrote.
He later came to regret those rules.
“It wasn’t courage,” he writes. “It was simply the minimum conditions of my conduct, and I recognize it now as the opposite of courage.”
Mr. Diller characterizes his relationship with Ms. von Furstenberg as one of “romantic love and deep respect, companionship and world adventuring,” including periods of separation and subsequent reunion, saying they “have spent 50 years intertwined with each other in a unique and complete love.”
Reached in Venice, Ms. von Furstenberg said in an interview that she did not see Mr. Diller’s announcement as a “coming out,” but rather as Mr. Diller simply telling the truth.
“All I can tell you is Barry and I have had an incredible life, love for 50 years,” she said. “We have been lovers, friends, married, everything. And, you know, for me, the secret to honor life, and to honor love, is never to lie.”
“Today, he opened to the world,” she added. “To me, he opened 50 years ago.”
Ms. von Furstenberg said “we never had to talk about our relationship, we lived our relationship,” including the last five years during which Mr. Diller was writing his memoir.
“He’s been private all his life, but not with me,” she said. “So for me, it doesn’t feel strange.”
A spokesman for Mr. Diller, Paul Bogaards, said the memoir, which is being released May 20, speaks for itself.
In the excerpt in New York, Mr. Diller describes a whirlwind romance with Ms. von Furstenberg after they met in 1974, including his giving her 29 diamonds for her 29th birthday a year later. “I didn’t know what to wrap them in, so I put them in a Band-Aid box,” he writes.
The couple would later separate, before reigniting their relationship and eventually marrying at City Hall in Manhattan. (The party that followed, at Ms. von Furstenberg’s Greenwich Village house, was more glamorous, drawing guests like the designer Calvin Klein, while André Leon Talley, the famed fashion editor, said the wedding was “everything that it should be for two people who have been through thick and thin.”)
Mr. Diller, who currently serves as chairman and senior executive at the Expedia Group and at IAC, a sprawling digital media and technology company, said he had “lived for decades reading about Diane and me: about us being best friends rather than lovers.”
“We weren’t just friends. We aren’t just friends,” Mr. Diller writes, calling it “an explosion of passion that kept up for years.”
“And, yes, I also liked guys, but that was not a conflict with my love for Diane,” he said. “I can’t explain it to myself or to the world. It simply happened to both of us.”
Jesse McKinley is a Times reporter covering politics, pop culture, lifestyle and the confluence of all three.
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