The Imagined Life & Times of Michael K

Like members of a secret society, fans of the blog DListed.com and its author, known only as Michael K, often find each other by using coded words. For example, I found out that my sister was a fellow DListed junkie when she referred to actress Cynthia Nixon’s partner, the redheaded and freckled Christine Mariononi, as “Rojo Caliente,” Michael K’s nickname for her. DListed aficionados are often entertainment junkies, people who devour news of a celebrity makeover or A-list breakup with the same fervor that sports fans use to keep track of their favorite team’s vital statistics. The monikers he assigns to minor celebrities – Lorenzo Lamas’ ex-wife Shauna Sand, known for her ability to wear mile-high plastic shoes in every kind of situation, is The Empress of Lucite – aren’t mean-spirited, but revel in celebrity absurdity and the extreme lengths some D- and F-list celebrities will go to in order to get attention. Even his feature “Hot Slut of the Day” isn’t about shaming someone for their number of sexual partners, it’s just a way to spotlight someone or something that Michael thinks is funny/campy/amusing. Past Hot Sluts of the Day have included Michelle Duggar (matriarch of the family featured on TLC’s show 19 Kids and Counting), the smoke monster from Lost, an internet meme known as Spaghetti Cat, and an image of Jesus that appeared on a banana peel.

While many entertainment blogs exist either to mindlessly fawn over celebrities or needlessly attack them for having the audacity to wear yoga pants in public, Michael K occupies a middle space. It’s not heady or intellectual, but it’s also not fluffy and dismissive – Dlisted delights in making fun of people while also loving them and celebrating the pure campy ridiculousness that is celebrity culture. Michael K also blogs obsessively about his non-celebrity favorite things like The Golden Girls or Mother’s Circus Animal Cookies (the pink and white frosted ones).

While DListed racks up thousands of pageviews per day, it differs from other celebrity blogs in that its author is not trying to collect some dregs of the fame for himself. Perez Hilton, author of the eponymous blog that lives to skewer celebrities by drawing penises on their pictures, makes the rounds as a TV pundit and does his best to ingratiate himself into the L.A. scene. Yet Michael K seems happy to continue toiling in obscurity. I know of at least three journalists who have attempted to meet him in person, but the only interview I’ve ever seen of Michael K was on The Awl.com and was conducted via email. Even the celebrity bloggers who aren’t interested in clubbing with Katy Perry often segue their web success into jobs as pundits on VH1 shows or guest columnists for newspapers and magazines. Michael K has done none of that. It’s entirely possible we’ve worked on our laptops at adjacent tables at a downtown coffee shop at the same time and never spoken to each other.

What do we know about Michael K? He’s originally from Los Angeles. He’s gay and has a huge crush on Anderson Cooper. From the Awl interview, I learned that Michael lives on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and has a very cute dog. But that’s about all we have to go on. Many Michael K junkies have a theory about who he is and why he hasn’t taken up any of the opportunities to reveal himself. Here’s mine: Michael works in the entertainment industry – perhaps at a talent agency or high-powered PR firm – and his fun side job would lose him his real one if anyone found out who he really was. However, my theory was debunked when Michael K told The Awl that he was able to make a living from his website, and even though he wasn’t becoming wealthy he was able to afford spending all day working on his blog. My friend Pauline, a motion picture researcher in Los Angeles, believes that Michael K is the queen of the cholas – the stereotypical Mexican-American women with penciled-in eyebrows and overly gelled hair whose beautiful absurdity the blogger often glorifies; Foster Kamer, the former weekend editor of Gawker.com, once wrote that he thinks Michael K moonlights as one of Yale’s Younger Poets. “I just can’t believe he’s young and hot,” said Ashley, a PR flack in San Francisco and admitted DListed addict. “I figured he was an older shlubby gay dude. He’s so deliciously jaded.”

There’s also another, more esoteric theory at play, this one regarding the origin of the blogger’s handle. It’s possible that Michael K is simply a shortened version of the blogger’s real name – perhaps he’s a Michael Kramer, or Knight, or Kane. But his name reminds some (or at least those of us with degrees in English Lit) of J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning 1985 novel, Life & Times of Michael K. The book is the story of a young apartheid-era South African man who journeys to his mother’s birthplace. Although racial tensions in the country are a backdrop of the novel’s events, Michael is never identified as black or white. Coetzee, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, is known for being a recluse who does very few public appearances, even declining to accept his Booker for Michael K in person. Sounds a little bit like someone else we can think of.

Does it matter that a blogger won’t reveal his identity? After all, Perez Hilton was a cult favorite when he ran the late PageSixSixSix.com, but by the time he relaunched the site under his own name he was also getting an assistant (his sister), talking about himself in the third person, and posting pictures of himself at exclusive events posing with famous people. Now, Perez is one of the most widely disliked pop culture figures in the country, and his blog has taken a steady decline in quality and timeliness as he devotes himself to other projects like putting together a boy band and launching a new fashion-centric website. It’s possible that Michael could go the same route if he were to out himself, becoming less and less of an enigma as he got invited to guest commentate on entertainment shows or landed a six-figure book deal. After all, the only thing Americans love more than elevating someone from obscurity to fame is trying to knock them back down again – the Australians call this phenomenon “tall poppy syndrome.” If you never become popular, it’s a lot harder to suffer from a backlash. Blogging’s hallmark, the thing that immediately separated it from the traditional print style of reporting, has been its first-person approach. Most successful blogs – Dlisted being no exception – are based around a charismatic writer whose personality engages the audience. Could you see the New York Times leading with a story about how celebrities need to stop fucking saying “over the moon” all the time whenever they’re happy about something? Or the Wall Street Journal ever devoting ink to random L.A. famewhores like Phoebe “Chicken Cutlets” Price? Part of what makes blogs – and, in particular, blogs like DListed – more fun is their conversational tone. As a result, it’s easier to feel like we “know” a particular blogger, who writes dozens of posts a day and makes references to their own life, interests, and hobbies than it is to feel like we “know” Maureen Dowd or David Brooks. And when we feel like someone is our friend, it’s almost a sort of rejection when they don’t want to be our friend in return. By essentially refusing to “be our friend” by appearing in the media and giving us insights into his personal life, Michael K’s low-key media existence could be an insult. But there’s another take – sometimes a blog is just a blog. If Michael K owes us anything, it’s the hilarious and clever content he manages to produce in staggering quantities each day. And we pay him back in pageviews, ad click-throughs, and devotion.