Perez Hilton Pursues Redemption

When a photo of Julia Roberts’s hairy armpit flashed on a screen behind him, Mr. Hilton mischievously compared the fluff to a Chia pet. “I can’t say things like that anymore and it’s driving me out of my mind!” he cried with an oversize toothy grin.

He lingered over a photo of Robert Pattinson, the actor’s shirt stained with sweat, and sniffed the armpit as the crowd murmured, “Eww.” Later, Mr. Hilton covered his maw as other photos flashed on screen: the battered face of the country singer Randy Travis after a car accident and subsequent arrest; an overweight Barbra Streisand; Oprah Winfrey, her face wrinkled like a Shar-Pei.

“I resolved I must be kind!” Mr. Hilton sang (none too convincingly).

One could argue that if Mr. Hilton was truly kinder, he might not have played his new persona for camp at others’ expense. But Mr. Hilton, who was born Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr., has been on something of a redemption tour since he rose (or sank) to fame with his highly trafficked gossip Web site, PerezHilton.com.

The site was a guilty novelty a few years ago, but celebrities and their support teams soon became fed up with his vicious insults (he once called the actress Jennifer Aniston “cripplingly codependent”) and doodles of penises (like the one he scrawled on a photo of Rumer Willis, the daughter of Bruce Willis). In 2009, he got into a brawl outside a Toronto club when he called the singer Will.i.am a homophobic slur.

When Mr. Hilton started speaking out against the bullying of gay teenagers in 2010, some in Hollywood cried hypocrisy. He was widely criticized for a tweet referring to a photo of Miley Cyrus, then 17, getting out of a car, her skirt hiked up. The reality star Khloe Kardashian, a frequent target of Mr. Hilton, circulated a video denouncing him. He went on Ellen DeGeneres’s show to deliver a public mea culpa and got a chilly reception.

Since then, a chastened Mr. Hilton, 34, has toned down his malicious rhetoric considerably, in keeping with a new culture of nice online that has accompanied the rise of social media. In April, he appeared onstage at Ms. Winfrey’s Life Class tour, describing his newfound enlightenment (brought on in part, he said, by weight loss) as a series of “aha orgasms.” He said he stopped drinking alcohol and began seeing a therapist this year. And in September, Mr. Hilton apologized on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens: Live” to Sarah Jessica Parker for years of mockery.

Mr. Hilton seemed repentant for the damage he inflicted, aware it could take years for him to make amends, if at all. “What’s important for me is not being liked, but it is that people think I am no longer toxic to the world,” he said, sipping a glass of Diet Coke at Chez Josephine.

He has revamped his Web site to include family-friendly pages on celebrity children, pets and fitness and says he wants to act on Broadway, have a talk show and host a music festival, all of which could put him awkwardly face-to-face with the very celebrities he has insulted for years.

“I’m aware of the fact there are going to be a lot of people with lingering resentment and a lot of skeptics,” he said. “And that’s O.K. because I am not pretending to be perfect.” Mr. Hilton started blogging in September 2004 and reached the apex of his popularity in 2007 when he made the rounds of popular talk shows like “The View” and was profiled by ABC’s “Nightline.”

But emboldened, perhaps, by his nom de plume and the curtain of cyberspace, he was less accountable to the truth than a Louella Parsons or Liz Smith. “I don’t believe that when you are famous you deserve to have lies written about you,” said Amanda Lundberg, a film and celebrity publicist whose clients include Tom Cruise, a frequent target of Mr. Hilton. “I don’t know why we as a culture think that’s cool.”

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