Meet the man running Liza Minnelli Outlives, Twitter’s most unlikely source for breaking news

Liza Minnelli has outlived 507 major news events — at least according to superfan and former employee Scott Gorenstein.

His Twitter account @LiZaOutlives has chronicled Minnelli’s lifespan through news headlines since 2020. Minnelli has outlived not just Mikhail Gorbachev and Stephen Sondheim, but Herschel Walker’s political career, a world without Bennifer, Internet Explorer, and Tom Brady’s brief retirement.

Known for Gorenstein’s black humor and to-the-point prose, @LiZaOutlives boasts over 115,000 followers who use the account like a funny news source. But for Gorenstein, it’s another way to do what he believes he’s done since his childhood, growing up in Northeast Philly: “Put Liza first.”

The account is a shrine to the complexity of internet stan culture, where fans perform dedication through tweets, fancams, and viral pleas to celebrities who seldom acknowledge them. Gorenstein loves Liza. It doesn’t matter if she loves him back.

And according to the New Yorker, she doesn’t. Making things even stickier, Gorenstein was once on his idol’s payroll, unlike most other internet fans posting into oblivion.

Still, it’s these stan accounts that set the agenda of the internet, its language, and who is allowed to speak it. Some have become celebrities in their own right — like Harry Styles fan Brittany Broski and Ashley Leechen, who reshaped her existence to mimic Taylor Swift — garnering more attention than their idols on obscure corners of the web.

But before there was Twitter, there was Gorenstein’s obsession with the singer-actress-dancer-original-nepo-baby, which was born while he was a student at Farrell Elementary in Rhawnhurst.

“I was born like this,” Gorenstein, now in his 50s, told The Inquirer. “I was into [Minnelli’s] celebrity more than anything. I couldn’t believe how sparkly she was.”

He started @LiZaOutlives as a riff on a meme format from a Twitter account that tracked actor Rip Torn’s lifespan in news events. Gorenstein even told the creator before sending his first tweet in February 2020: Liza had outlived the marriage of Pamela Anderson and Jon Peters.

Gorenstein said he intended for the account to “be an exercise in writing and a chance to throw my lady’s name out there,” not a news source, joke-factory hybrid.

Yet @LiZaOutlives works because of who Minnelli is: A gay icon patterned after her mother, an Oscar winner who inspires drag queens, and someone whose staying power comes from a wit hardened by trauma — not unlike Gorenstein.

Jay Blotcher, a friend of Gorenstein’s, said Gorenstein’s knack for dark humor comes from their time spent working as volunteer publicists for ACT UP and Queer Nation beginning in the 1980s when they needed a “good sense of humor” to “face difficult things on a daily basis” as they fought to reshape the narrative around HIV and AIDS.

“Scott is witheringly funny,” Blotcher said. “He gets away with the most audacious things.”

@LiZaOutlives isn’t driven by Minnelli or the news cycle. It’s driven by Gorenstein.

“It’s about me,” he said. “It has to feel organic.”

Gorenstein doesn’t have rules for what gets tweeted. Some alerts are serious, some are not, but all coalesce around his secondary loves: the greater Bravo universe, British royalty, Broadway-adjacent gossip, and current affairs.

After @LiZaOutlives announced the death of Queen Elizabeth II within a minute of Buckingham Palace, learning via Liza became its own bit.

Yet Gorenstein is shocked the account has a life beyond its namesake.

That’s normal, according to Jessa Lingel, an associate professor of gender studies and communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School, where she researches digital culture.

“As your audience gets bigger, you’re going to find that you lose your ability to control how your memes are interpreted,” Lingel said. “The audience is going to create its own rules.”

Gorenstein has become “completely obsessed with getting it right” as Twitter’s policies governing the spread of misinformation have laxed under Elon Musk. The time Liza Minnelli had outlived conservative talk radio giant Rush Limbaugh in 2021 was instructive.

“Normally I would editorialize because I hate Rush Limbaugh, but I didn’t. I kept it clean,” Gorenstein said. With over 77,000 likes, the tweet is still his most successful.

Others try and fail to imitate Gorenstein. When Rolling Stone tweeted that Liza Minnelli had outlived double verification on Twitter in November, the replies were scathing.

“This comes off like a boomer hearing YOLO for the first time and using it wrong for months,” wrote one Twitter user.

@LiZaOutlives represents the paradox of internet fandoms: The shrines we build to celebrities are both bigger than these famous people but also irrevocably intertwined with them.

For Gorenstein, Minnelli is both larger than life and a very real part of his. He went from adoring fan, to doting publicist, to something in between.

One of Gorenstein’s most enduring childhood friends was Scott Schechter, a Northeast High School alum who would become the official chronicler of Minnelli and Judy Garland’s lives. He’d eventually pitch Gorenstein as a publicist to Minnelli’s team, but Gorenstein shied away from working with his idol until Schechter died in 2009, leaving him an extensive collection of Liza and Judy paraphernalia.

The collection now decorates Gorenstein’s Jersey City brownstone but not before earning him a chance to work with Minnelli on her 2009 Las Vegas residency.

Their working relationship would peter out when she moved to Los Angeles sometime around 2016, but Gorenstein said his connection with Liza was one of unfettered devotion: “She knew I would do anything for her.”

Anything, as it stands, just short of deleting @LiZaOutlives.

When the New Yorker reached out to Minnelli for comment during a 2021 profile of Gorenstein, a representative spurned him and the account.

“I do not support ‘LizaMinnelliOutlives’ (nor its creator Scott Gorenstein), because it is predicated on the idea that I should not be alive, which I find hurtful and offensive,” her manager wrote, saying the message came from Minnelli herself.

Gorenstein “highly suspects the quote didn’t come from her,” saying “[his] heart” is what keeps him going without Minnelli’s public support.

His denial of Liza’s feelings begs a question: When does being a stan become less about the celebrities themselves and more about the art of loving them?

“There’s this sense of listening to every song, going to every musical that leads people to think they have ownership over someone’s public persona,” said Lingel.

Gorenstein still feels this, even after leaving Minnelli’s payroll.

“I don’t like ceding control when it comes to Liza,” Gorenstein said. “In my own way, I’ll be promoting her for the rest of my life.”