The Making of a ‘Memoir’

Chastity Bono has never been comfortable with the celebrity that comes with being the daughter of Sonny and Cher. As a child, she was happy to escape the glamour of her mother’s life for an afternoon of skateboarding at the Thousand Oaks home of her best friend. “I was always striving for normality,” she said by phone Monday from her West Hollywood home.

In recent years, however, Bono has embraced the limelight as an outspoken advocate for gay and lesbian rights. Her very public role emerged, she says, from the heartbreak that followed the death of her lover, Joan Stephens, in 1994 to non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

In her new book, “The End of Innocence: A Memoir” (Alyson Publications), Bono, who’s 33, details her love affair with Stephens, a woman in her 40s and a childhood friend of Cher.

Bono was 24 and struggling to make a record with her rock band when she realized she didn’t have the drive to stay in the music business. For one thing, she had to hide too much. Although a tabloid reported her homosexuality in 1990, Bono refused to go public for fear of derailing her music career.

Eventually, she relinquished her record deal to nurse Stephens. The experience, Bono said, “gave me a sense of confidence that I didn’t have before.”

After Stephens died, Bono spent a year immobilized with grief. “I had no idea what to do with my life,” she said. Then, in 1995, she started writing for the Advocate and publicly proclaimed herself a lesbian on its cover. She went on to become spokeswoman for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay and lesbian political organization.

Through it all, Bono and Cher remained close. “I went through such a change in how I felt about my orientation,” Bono said.

“That kind of enabled my mom to take the next step ... going from accepting me and loving me to really having my sexual orientation not be an issue at all.”

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Space Tourist Shares His Slides

Watching someone else’s holiday slides may be an uninspired way to spend an evening--unless you’re a friend of multimillionaire Dennis Tito. On Saturday, the famed space tourist will be showing slides and home movies from his 2001 space vacation to raise funds for UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center.

The event at his Pacific Palisades home also gives the 60-year-old Tito an opportunity to tell a crowd of about 250 well-heeled guests about the experience and its impact.

It’s rare, he said by phone from his house, “that you experience something radically different in your life. After marriage and your first children, life becomes another European city, another cathedral.”

His trip to space, however, was “a life’s dream.” He has since talked to other people interested in space travel, including the 28-year-old Internet millionaire Mark Shuttleworth, who came back from his trip to space earlier this month. “It’s all worth it,” Tito said he tells the prospective space tourists. “The experience changes you forever .... It gives you a sense of accomplishment, confidence and self-esteem.”

A ticket to space costs about $20 million, but the cash-strapped can take in the slide show. Tickets for the evening go for $1,250.