Anderson Cooper: Coming out and being out

Anderson Cooper, one of the best-known news journalist around, just took the step that so many LGBT people have dreaded, avoided, and then dared. He came out.

But Cooper's coming out wasn’t in the old mold: “Mom, Dad, you'd better sit down. I have something to tell you. I’m gay. I can’t help it! I’m sorry! Please don’t hate me!” Or even in the more recent, more self-assured version: “I’m here. I’m queer. Get used to it.”

Instead, he joined the growing number of folks whose coming out is as matter of fact as saying “I’m blond.” Of course, Cooper is hugely privileged—a rich, white, grown man who has a great deal of control over his everyday safety and comfort (if not his workaday safety and comfort in war zones). That makes it much easier to be casual about coming out than it would be for, say, a kid living in a conservative home, a parent who worries about losing her or his kids, someone whose job might be in jeopardy. And of course being queer is in fact a much bigger issue than being blond. It comes with a load of stigma, a gauntlet of barriers to be circumvented, and terrors to be stared down. It also comes with the special joys of freedom to play with gender, to invent new forms of relationships, to build a “family of choice.” But it’s not as trivial as hair color.

Cooper gave the same reasons for not coming out earlier that many of us gave: it might hurt my career or job possibilities; I don't want to make it all about me; I want to keep a boundary between my public and my personal life. Often, all those explanations disguise realistic fear: of rejection, of danger, of unknown demons. What Cooper finally realized is that his coming out wasn't all about him. It was about all of us. It's always about all of us. About making us visible to each other and to the world. And, as feminists long ago taught us, the personal is always political. Who I am as a person both reflects and changes how the world treats me. We change the world by bringing our personal stories into the public arena.


Still, whatever it took him to get there, what’s striking about Cooper’s coming out is that he seems so totally comfortable with it—as if it were a non-issue. And by that very attitude, he helps to make it a non-issue. His explanation of his process, which he shares here with Andrew Sullivan, reminds me of a conversation my partner and I have often had about the difference between “coming out” and “being out.” The former makes an event of it, a major announcement. In the process, it makes the revelation and the identity HUGE, and therefore, hugely important, out of the ordinary, newsworthy. Being out, by contrast, involves treating LGBT identity as ordinary, everyday—let me say it, normal.

 So, for instance, I was being out when I said to the garden lady, “My partner is really sensitive to smells. Will this rose of Sharon bother her?” I was being out when I renewed our membership at Chautauqua, and the person asked who the two parties were and what their relationship was. I gave our names and said, “She’s my partner.”

It’s the same sort of comment one would easily make about a spouse or a girl/boyfriend. But LGBT folks, myself included, hesitate to do it—even when, like me, we enjoy great privilege and live in a pretty liberal environment. We hesitate for many reasons, of course. But one of them, at least for us oldies, is the feeling that you can’t say anything about your identity without having The Coming Out Conversation.

Maybe that was true back in the day. Maybe it still is for people in some circumstances. But increasingly, many of us find that just being out works fine for us. Just fine.

It seems to me that Anderson Cooper was in that same frame of mind as he described his decision to tell the world he’s gay. It's true, he could have been out sooner and avoided the need to come out. We could excoriate him for being closeted for so long, for failing to be the model he could have been. For implying by his hiding that being gay is somehow shameful, something that needs to be hidden. And we could dismiss him as just the latest in a long line of gay idols who serve to make ideal gay people acceptable without changing attitudes toward us ordinary LGBT folks.  And all of that would be legitimate.

Or we could celebrate the ease with which public coming out is now possible, how ordinary it has become. We could consider Anderson Cooper an important, highly visible, smart model for LGBT folks to watch as they consider how to come out, be out. And to other folks as they consider how to treat us down the line. I really get the former critiques, but I think I prefer the latter approach.