Counting What the Gay/Lesbian community Goes through Anderson’s Silence Was a Problem
Anderson Cooper and Oscar the Grouch at the 39th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards. Photograph: Kevin Winter/Getty Images
Congratulations, Anderson Cooper, on finally coming out of the closet. This is a big day for you, a day when you can finally leave the converted firehouse you share with your live-in boyfriend with your head held high and, for the first time, not worry about what people may be writing about your relationship.
It is also a great day for gay people around the world, a day when we get another successful gay man to combat negative stereotypes and ignorant bigotry. Even with his notorious giggle, who better than the "silver fox" to increase the visibility in the fight for gay civil rights. This guy is a walking, talking "It Gets Better" video.
Though Cooper's declaration of gayness may come as a revelation to some, it won't be much of a surprise to followers of celebrity gossip websites and gay magazines, which have written about Cooper's sexuality for some time. As a staff writer at Gawker, I was one of those who wrote most often about the subject. I once published a post titled Anderson Cooper Is a Giant Homosexual and Everyone Knows It. Even this was two years after Out magazine put Cooper on the cover of its "glass closet" issue and five years after Village Voice legend Michael Musto first published the fact of his homosexuality. My point was that Anderson Cooper's sexual orientation was something that many journalists already knew, and refused to report.
This is important because, according to the letter that Anderson sentdecreasingly conservative gay blogger Andrew Sullivan declaring, "The fact is, I'm gay," is centered all around his own career as a journalist.
"Since my early days as a reporter, I have worked hard to accurately and fairly portray gay and lesbian people in the media – and to fairly and accurately portray those who for whatever reason disapprove of them. It is not part of my job to push an agenda, but rather to be relentlessly honest in everything I see, say and do. I've never wanted to be any kind of reporter other than a good one, and I do not desire to promote any cause other than the truth," Cooper wrote.
Those are precisely the same reasons that fueled what I am happy to admit was my personal crusade to nudge Cooper slowly out of the closet, whether he wanted to come or not. Every gay New Yorker with a set of eyes and a membership to David Barton Gym could see the truth, and I thought it the height of hypocrisy not to report it. The same held for journalists who either refused to ask questions about Anderson's personal life or, even worse, those who knew or witnessed the answer and refused to put it down on the record out of some misguided quest of decency. They never would have done that to a straight news anchor they were profiling. Cooper did not keep this secret alone and I thought all his accomplices should be held accountable.
That's why I felt the need to tell everyone that Anderson brought his boyfriend to the Vanity Fair Oscar party and was even photographed with him. It's why I also pointed out that they were partying together on a float when Anderson was the grand marshal of a Mardi Gras parade. And I snickered with delight when gossip column Page Six upgraded his boyfriend's status from "friend" to "companion", still afraid to take that final plunge in print and call him a "partner". I must have written dozens of stories over the years pointing out Cooper's orientation, details of hisboyfriend's personal life and the gay bar he runs, and pointing out the hilarity that he continued to maintain his increasingly feeble charade.
I got a lot of flak, from gays and straights alike, for talking about this issue at length before Cooper was ready to do it himself. I was told to give Anderson his privacy, that everyone always knew so he didn't have to make a statement, that straight newscasters don't come out so he doesn't have to either, and that coming out would put him in danger in certain parts of the world. I felt, and still feel, that all of that is bullshit.
I don't regret my onslaught at all, particularly now that it appears the press scrutiny (hopefully including my contributions) has played some part in his decision finally to knock the closet door off its hinges.
"It's become clear to me that by remaining silent on certain aspects of my personal life for so long, I have given some the mistaken impression that I am trying to hide something – something that makes me uncomfortable, ashamed or even afraid. This is distressing because it is simply not true," Cooper wrote.
I'm glad that he acknowledged that, because it was the same argument I used against detractors of writing about his orientation – that being in the glass closet was even worse, because it shows people that being gay is something that should be hidden. In the last few years more and more media outlets have written about his sexuality to the point where Cooper's silence became absurd. Even the New York Times mentioned it, drawing only the most transparent of veils over the salient fact in a review of his his new talk show.
Journalism was at the center of this whole thing, and in the end, integrity won out. Cooper came to realize that, in the context of the greater struggles that gay men and women deal with in this country and around the world, sometimes we need to sacrifice a bit of our privacy for the greater good.
But today shouldn't be about finger pointing, credit claiming, or rehearsing the same old Anderson arguments we've been having for years. Today is a day that everyone who has ever had the courage to come out of the closet should be glad there is one more role model for all the gay children suffering through high school, that there is one more person to show all the mothers out there that having a gay child is a wonderful thing, that there is one more person to show that, no matter who you love, you can always have the courage to tell the truth.
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