83-year-old American billionaire Barry Diller has come out as gay, 24 years after marrying fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg.
Diller is the chairman and senior executive of IAC, an international media company, and Expedia Group, an American travel company.
He married von Furstenberg in 2001. Now, in his new memoir, Diller addressed for the first time decades of speculation about his sexuality and his marriage to the fashion designer. He revealed that he had only been interested in men until he met von Furstenberg when he was 33.
“While there have been a good many men in my life, there has only ever been one woman, and she didn’t come into my life until I was 33 years old,” the billionaire wrote Tuesday in an essay for New York Magazine titled, “The truth about us, after all these years” ahead of the release of his memoir, “Who Knew.”
“I have never questioned my sexuality’s basic authority over my life (I was only afraid of the reaction of others),” he added, as per the New York Post.
The 83-year-old said that when he began dating von Furstenberg, after they met in 1974, he “never questioned that its biological imperative was as strong in its heterosexuality as its opposite had been.” He added that when the romance happened, his initial response was “Who knew?”
Before meeting von Furstenberg, Diller said that he had never publicly come out. He revealed that he vowed to himself that he would “live with silence, but not with hypocrisy,” and “wouldn’t do a single thing to make anyone believe I was living a heterosexual life.” As a result, when Diller and von Furstenberg, now 78, became a couple, he said people noticed. At the time, the 83-year-old was the chairman of Paramount Pictures, and von Furstenberg was an established designer.
“Much of the speculation subsided when it was clear to all we couldn’t keep our hands off each other,” Diller said.
According to NBC News, Diller and von Furstenberg dated for a few years and lived together until they separated in 1981. He said that von Furstenberg re-entered his life 10 years later, and a decade after that, they married.
“I’ve lived for decades reading about Diane and me: about us being best friends rather than lovers,” Diller wrote. “We weren’t just friends. We aren’t just friends. Plain and simple, it was 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 continued.
He added that he and Diane were in some “cosmic” way “destined for each other.”
In the excerpt of his new memoir, Diller did not use either gay or bisexual to describe his sexuality. In fact, he wrote that Europeans “had a wiser attitude” about sexuality, and that today, “sexual identities are much more fluid and natural, without all those rigidly defined lanes of the last century.”
“I’ve always thought that you never really know about anyone else’s relationships,” he wrote. “But I do know about ours. It is the bedrock of my life. What others think sometimes irritates but mostly amuses us. We know, our family knows, and our friends know. The rest is blather,” the 83-year-old added.
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