{"id":2379922,"date":"2026-04-19T12:52:55","date_gmt":"2026-04-19T12:52:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2379922"},"modified":"2026-04-19T12:52:55","modified_gmt":"2026-04-19T12:52:55","slug":"michael-k-and-the-disappearing-celebrity-blogger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/michael-k-and-the-disappearing-celebrity-blogger\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael K and the Disappearing Celebrity Blogger"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n

Image: Elena Scotti\/GMG<\/p>\n

You know when you really like someone, a lot, to the point where it becomes your life\u2019s work to make them notice you, so, for some reason, without fail, you take on their mannerisms\u2014a tweaked-out accelerated version, usually\u2014as though your only chance of getting them to see you is to be their reflection? And the longer this goes on, the more you start shedding the act and reverting to a stripped-down version of yourself, which is, in fact, worse than the self you should have started with?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

That\u2019s kind of what I did with Michael K.<\/p>\n

\nI read an article<\/a> that called him \u201cGay Shakespeare,\u201d which, it\u2019s a little much, but his blog, Dlisted<\/a>, does tend to be read by people who actually read (like Tina Fey). You know the mot juste<\/em>? He has the shade <\/em>juste<\/em>.<\/em> This is what happened<\/a> in his brain when he saw Lindsay Lohan dance in Mykonos: \u201cIf somebody\u2019s osteoporosis-having grandma got drunk on four white wine spritzers before her dance audition for the role of Velma Kelly in Shady Pines\u2019 production of Chicago, she would serve up the same kind of old lady hotness that LiLo served up in Greece. And yes, she\u2019d get the role thanks to that Boniva leg shuffle.\u201d <\/p>\n

There\u2019s still gossip, but it\u2019s back in the social sphere where it came from, people saying smart stupid things in a sentence or even an image. Michael K barely uses Twitter\u2014you can\u2019t write a sonnet in 140 characters<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He\u2019s called his own writing trash and maybe it is but it\u2019s some of the best dog-eared piss-stained pulp you\u2019ll find out there. He turns viral cats into Hot Sluts of the Day, Chris Pine\u2019s penis into a \u201cprostate-busting peen\u201d and Petra Collins\u2019s whatever-that-is into a \u201csedated Victoria apparition.\u201d And his nicknames make you wonder why they aren\u2019t birth names: Empress of Lucite (Playmate Shauna Sand), Texas T-Rex (Matthew McConaughey), Chicken Cutlets (quintessential D-lister Phoebe Price).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I miss him. I miss the world that made him. Not that he\u2019s entirely gone. He still posts a couple times a day, but he has other writers now. And it\u2019s not just him, it\u2019s everything. All the other celebrity gossip bloggers\u2014Lainey Lui, Jared Eng, Perez Hilton\u2014no one really talks about them anymore. Not their blogs, anyway. All these huge places saw what they were doing ($$$) and started blogs of their own and basically, everything is a blog now. There\u2019s still gossip, but it\u2019s back in the social sphere where it came from, people saying smart stupid things in a sentence or even an image. Michael K barely uses Twitter\u2014you can\u2019t write a sonnet in 140 characters.<\/p>\n

\nHe should have been easy to find. His email is right there, [email\u00a0protected]<\/a>. So I emailed him and nothing. I emailed him again, and nothing again. So I emailed him again and again. The problem is, you can\u2019t stalk this guy. He never uses his last name and he isn\u2019t much online outside of his blog. He has done a handful of interviews but has revealed, like, next to nothing about his private life.<\/p>\n
\nMichael K was always the anonymous one, even back when he started on January 23, 2005, while working admin at a gay hookup site, because, of course. One drop in the seminal wave of celebrity gossip blogs\u2014and yes that is supposed to sound disgusting. They were all girls or gay guys because even though literally everyone loves gossip, it has always been dismissed (along with all the best things in life) as a girlie past-time. Lainey Lui(LaineyGossip, 2003) was the smart one, Mario Lavendeira (Perez Hilton, 2004) was the dick who drew dicks, Karl Wang (The Superficial, 2004) was a smarter dick, Jared Eng (JustJared, 2005) was the nice one, and Lisa Sugar (PopSugar, 2006) was basically like her name. There was also a contingent of black bloggers arriving in parallel to cover the neglected world of black gossip, including linguistic genius Shareka Roberts (Crunk and Disorderly, 2005), bright-eyed Natasha Eubanks (Young, Black, and Fabulous, 2005) and aspiring mogul Jamarlin Martin (Bossip, 2006). \u201cWhen you talk about Michael K and Dlisted, he has always been the natural comedian of everybody,\u201d Lui tells me (she has always shared links with him, a grassroots way for bloggers to support each other). <\/p>\n

The point is that this private-public breakdown was in the air and a bunch of kids just like us were given the ability to jump on it<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Obviously, gossip columnists preceded these guys by a million years. Louella Parsons was the first, around 1914, followed by Hedda Hopper, both of them putting the fear of God into Hollywood (weirdly, since the studios basically worked with them). These new gossips were different, though. For one thing, they were online, for another, they weren\u2019t part of the machine. You had this whole generation of young people (I was one of them; I was young once), who were creeping online and suddenly they were given these free publishing tools like Livejournal and Blogspot and Blogger and fuck if they didn\u2019t use them to talk about fucking, but, like, also the culture.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It\u2019s kind of hard to pinpoint how all these culture-savvy kids became the collective voice of celebrity gossip, but around the same time Bonnie Fuller became the editor-in-chief of Us Magazine<\/em> and launched the greatest magazine feature to ever exist: \u201cStars\u2014They\u2019re Just Like Us!\u201d I don\u2019t know about anyone else, but I was pretty convinced at 22 that every single person with over $1 million refused to pump gas or dump trash. The point is that this private-public breakdown was in the air and a bunch of kids just like us were given the ability to jump on it.<\/p>\n

\nMichael K answered. Turns out all my emails went to spam. <\/p>\n
\n\u201cI like it \u2018cause it\u2019s like I\u2019m talking to my friends,\u201d that\u2019s what a bunch of blog readers told Erin A. Meyers who surveyed them for her book with the overly long title, Dishing Dirt in the Digital Age: Celebrity Gossip Blogs and Participatory Media Culture. <\/em>\u201cThey already knew the news, they just wanted to see what Perez had to say about it,\u201d she tells me. Perez Hilton didn\u2019t say much, to be honest, that\u2019s probably why he had one of the top 10 most visited entertainment sites next to People<\/em>, within three years of launch. He was a gay misogynist who scrawled cocks and coke all over pap shots, a shameless self-promoter who thought it was fun to call Miley Cyrus a \u201cslut.\u201d This was the late 2000s, remember, not a time of deep self-reflection in which we were collectively interrogating a historically patriarchal discourse. Most of us just kind of went along with it; Perez Hilton was our pop cultural id.<\/p>\n

This was the late 2000s, remember, not a time of deep self-reflection in which we were collectively interrogating a historically patriarchal discourse<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But a bunch of us knew Michael K was better than that. He wasn\u2019t on the cover of The Advocate <\/em>or profiled in The New York Times<\/em>. He didn\u2019t have a TV show. Like all great writers, he didn\u2019t need that shit, he had his writing. Which is why it\u2019s a bit of a tragedy that he got submerged along with the rest of the industry. By 2007, the gossip bloggers told Meyers, the industry was already saturated.<\/p>\n

Late to the party as always, mainstream media was launching its own blogs like Yahoo! omg or buying the small ones for crazy money (Avid Life Media reportedly offered Perez $20 million). Then Britney Spears had a breakdown and snarking on celebrities started to look a bit gauche. They had control now anyway with Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. By the close of the first decade of the new century, it didn\u2019t really matter what Michael K said or how he said it. Celebrities were speaking for themselves and, when they weren\u2019t, it wasn\u2019t Perez adding a penile flourish with MS Paint, it was TMZ slapping up an actual penis, no comment required.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\nI did not expect Michael K to sound like this. I don\u2019t know what I expected \u2013 probably, like, RuPaul? Anyway, he has the most endearing voice on earth. He sounds like Kermit the Frog lost in a fog. He speaks from his throat and it kind of sounds like he has a cold. Anyway. He\u2019s also a lot more reticent than I thought he would be. He says Dlisted is him but a more outgoing version.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m much more of an introvert,\u201d he tells me from his Adam\u2019s apple. When I say I\u2019m using a phone card, he says he can call me back and I don\u2019t let him because I can\u2019t imagine he makes much more than me. I see the other bloggers expanding their \u201cbrands\u201d with television and becoming indistinguishable from, like, Nancy O\u2019Dell, but not him. \u201cI don\u2019t really like attention,\u201d he explains. \u201cI feel more comfortable at my desk.\u201d He says there were offers but he didn\u2019t translate on screen. Anyway, it turns out even though his traffic, which he barely checks anymore, was cut in half by Twitter, he continues to get 600,000 hits a day or \u201chalf-a-pack of Virginia Slims a year.\u201d<\/p>\n

His site has kind of grown. He had guest writers as far back as 2007 and now it\u2019s him and four other bloggers. Allison Davey, who is Canadian like me, was hired five years ago after a callout for interns (I applied for that job, bitch). The way she describes K, he sounds like the kind of mentor you don\u2019t often find in media anymore; patient, nurturing, rigorous, even with someone as inexperienced as Davey says she was. According to her, he is equal parts hard working and intuitive and that means her work has \u201cgot to be great because I know his standard is high.\u201d Thank god Michael K has to work as much as the rest of us on his writing. It almost seems natural that he is less popular than he used to be\u2014all of us are.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The rigor doesn\u2019t surprise me, either, there was always something kind of higher-minded about Dlisted. Dr. Anne Graefer, a lecturer in media theory at Birmingham City University who wrote her dissertation on humor in gossip blogs (what a world), says she found Michael K more politically correct than many of his peers.<\/p>\n

Before hashtags were even a thing, he dropped his most searched feature, blind items, because the ones about sexual assault \u201cfelt crossing a line\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Before hashtags were even a thing, he dropped his most searched feature, blind items, because the ones about sexual assault \u201cfelt crossing a line.\u201d And when you consider not only his sexuality but his ethnicity\u2014his father is Japanese, his mother Spanish\u2014it follows that he would have a marginalized gaze. He uses theatrically vulgar camp humor, a hallmark of queer culture, but he uses it specifically to bolster \u201ctacky glamour,\u201d as he calls it, while tearing down privilege: shitting on Goop, thirsting after Prince Harry. As Graefer puts it, \u201cThe crucial point is that Michael K\u2019s humor kicks socially upwards and not downwards.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nThe larger culture caught up with Michael K at the same time that it appeared to deem him irrelevant. The Shade Room sashayed onto Instagram in 2014 with all the black gossip and snatched up 14 million followers in no time, disrupting blogs for good. Founder Angelica Nwandu didn\u2019t let anyone act out on her site, which was in line with a wider shift from snark (the language of blogs) to smarm (the language of Republicans). She was also transparent about her politics, slicing up light content with heavier issues like Black Lives Matter. This heralded a more general move by the media towards representation. LaineyGossip, for example, is now made up of a diverse staff of entirely of women who infuse their posts with intersectionality. \u201cBack then my site and me were a reflection of what we believed then,\u201d Lui says. \u201cNow my reflection is about who I am now and the conversations we\u2019re having now.\u201d <\/p>\n

Like we all do, Michael K feels immense pressure to cover \u201cthe heavy stuff\u201d but he tries not to. \u201cIt\u2019s, like, not our lane,\u201d he says. \u201cThe only reason to really do it would be for clicks and to get commenters to fight in the comments about it.\u201d Either way, the community he built is no longer the only concern. The recent arrival of stan culture\u2014online groupies with a rabid approach to those who do not support their cause, in this case, Lady Gaga\u2014means that Michael K must sort through letter bombs in an inbox that was previously occupied by regular readers.<\/p>\n

In August 2016, for instance, K wrote about Lady Gaga\u2019s casting in A Star Is Born<\/em>. \u201cBarbra Streisand just pulled out a shovel and is making her way to Judy Garland\u2019s grave,\u201d he wrote. \u201cShe\u2019ll dig until she hits the casket and then she\u2019ll open it up, get in and roll with Judy.\u201d In response, he received an email from [email\u00a0protected]<\/a>, which read, \u201cHey, faggot. I saw your article about Lady Gaga today and thought I\u2019d warn you. If you don\u2019t stop criticizing her, this picture shows what will happen to you.\u201d The picture was a graphic image of a double Taliban beheading.<\/p>\n

\nMichael Kuroiwa has a podcast now \u2013 the guy who has been relatively anonymous for 13 years said I could publish his name. \u201cAt the beginning, I cared but now I don\u2019t really,\u201d he says. The guy who stopped blogging about his personal life because his family and friends complained, the one who created a persona because he didn\u2019t want it to be all about him (\u201cthat\u2019s not that interesting\u201d), that guy has traded in his anonymity for a changing culture which eclipsed the industry that birthed Michael K. \u201cIt feels like a lot of people aren\u2019t getting their information from blogs anymore,\u201d he says, \u201cthey\u2019re getting it from podcasts.\u201d (Tell that to Buzzfeed). <\/p>\n

It\u2019s weird to hear Michael K collapse into Michael Kuroiwa after reading him for so long<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s weird to hear Michael K collapse into Michael Kuroiwa after reading him for so long. As the podcast goes on, the two personas have begun to fuse, K\u2019s flagrant camp melding into Kuroiwa\u2019s quiet wit. But every day I still wait for him on Dlisted because every day he writes something like this: \u201cSince bitterness and cynicism are the not-so-secret ingredients that keep the frostbitten bag of rotten vulture gizzards I call a heart nice and frozen, I truly let out an, \u2018Oh my fucking GOD no!,\u2019 while watching last night\u2019s Emmys when I realized that a live wedding proposal was about to go down\u2026 I screamed, \u2018Please let her say NO,\u2019 right after. But she didn\u2019t, and the icy turd in my chest may or may not have melted a little when she said yes. DAMMIT! I hate feeling things.\u201d Same.<\/p>\n

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads and the author of <\/em>In My Humble Opinion: My So-Called Life.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n


\n <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.jezebel.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Image: Elena Scotti\/GMG You know when you really like someone, a lot, to the point where it becomes your life\u2019s work to make them notice you, so, for some reason, without fail, you take on their mannerisms\u2014a tweaked-out accelerated version, usually\u2014as though your only chance of getting them to see you is to be their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2379923,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2379922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-celebrities"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Michael-K-and-the-Disappearing-Celebrity-Blogger.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2379922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2379922"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2379922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2379924,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2379922\/revisions\/2379924"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2379923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2379922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2379922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2379922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}