Gawker And The Guardian Credit Me With Groundbreaking Anderson Cooper Reporting

CNN superstar Anderson Cooper came out yesterday, and I felt it was a major move, if such a long time a-coming that I’ve turned gray (and it doesn’t look quite as dashing as it does on Anderson).

In fact, Gawker’s Max Read just did a history of Anderson coverage and noted the early importance of my Village Voice writings, starting way back in 2003.

And The Guardian‘s Brian Moylan–in remembering how he wrote a piece about Cooper’s sexuality for Gawker–admits, “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.”

And I wrote that Out story too, by the way.

Anyway, even if you loathe my work, it’s gratifying for me to be given credit for having been there at the forefront, urging public figures to come out and critiquing the evasive media for acting like any gay discussion should remain taboo and distasteful.

The general reaction yesterday was positive to mild, but believe me, nine years ago, reporting on this kind of thing was considered as shocking as a flash of stocking was about a century ago.

Yay, progress!

PS: I tweeted yesterday that I love Anderson and am happy for him. Someone snarked back, “If a conservative gay who supports Romney took that long to come out, you wouldn’t write the same thing.”

I replied: “I wouldn’t want them to come out.”