Anderson Cooper Talks About His Sexual Awakening & The Celeb Who Was Involved

Anderson said that he realized he is gay when he was 11-years-old and attending a performance of the Broadway play Bent starring Richard Gere.

Check out the interview below…

Andy Cohen: What was it like coming out to Gloria Vanderbilt? I mean, your mom was friends with Truman Capote. You had Gore Vidal at your house. I mean, you grew up…

Anderson Cooper: Yeah. There were a lot of gays around.

Andy Cohen: There were a lot of gays around and kind of famous gays.

Anderson Cooper: Actually. So I get, sorry, when I was 11, my mom’s, a friend of my mom’s, a photographer named Paul Jasmin came with his boyfriend, uh, I guess his boyfriend who had a diamond embedded in his front tooth, which I thought was interesting.

Andy Cohen: Which was way before anyone was doing that.

Anderson Cooper: Yeah. We’re talking 1977. And they took me to see Richard Gere in Bent, which…

Andy Cohen: Are you kidding me? So, you were 11.

Anderson Cooper: Yeah. If anyone doesn’t know about the play, Bent it’s about two gay guys in the concentration camp. I mean the opening scene…It is the gayest thing you can imagine.

Andy Cohen: Starring Richard Gere, wow.

Anderson Cooper: And this was Richard Gere in 1977, Looking for Mr. Goodbar. He was so beautiful. And I’m there. My mom didn’t go. It was just me and my mom’s two gay friends. And I’m watching this thing and literally the opening scene of Bent, like there’s a guy in bed who’s just, who was picked up some guy the night before and the guy he’s picked up gets out bed is completely naked and then puts on his SS stormtrooper uniform.

Andy Cohen: Oh my God.

Anderson Cooper: And I just remember being like, ‘oh my God, I’m gay. Like, this is, I’m totally gay.’ And, and afterward that Paul Jasmin was friends with Richard Gere. Cause Paul Jasmin took the pictures for American Gigolo and we go backstage and Richard Gere is shirtless in his dressing room. And I, I was so, I couldn’t speak. I, I didn’t. And I had my Playbill and I wanted to get him to autographed, but I was too. I just couldn’t stop staring his chest. And, uh, so fast forward to, I dunno, 10 years ago I was interviewing Richard Gere and I took out the Playbill and I told. I had the Playbill still and I told him the whole story and I had him sign it. Yeah. He was very tickled with it.

Andy Cohen: I’m sure he was. So, but when did you tell your mom you were gay?

Anderson Cooper: I told her the, I think it was the right after I graduated college. And yeah. And, but I’d had a boyfriend at that point for three years whom she knew and he used to sleep over and like nobody was making up a spare bed and, but she never asked about it. You know?

Andy Cohen: And what did she say?

Anderson Cooper: So I said to her finally, like, I, I stupidly said, ‘I think I’m gay.’ I should have just, but I wanted to kind of couch it. And she said, ‘huh?’ She said, ‘well, don’t make any definite decisions.’

Andy Cohen: Wow. Yeah. That is kind of surprising.

Anderson Cooper: It was surprising. Yeah. Yeah. It turns out, but she was cool about it. But she was just like, ‘well, don’t make any definite decisions.’ And, and then, which was not the response I was expecting. So, I was like, ‘let’s put a pin in it for now.’

Andy Cohen: Did you ever come back to it.

Anderson Cooper: Yeah, we did. We came back to it and really what it’s too long and boring a story. But her mother had been, her mother was probably bisexual. Her mother was revealed to have had a lesbian relationship during a court battle in 1932. That was a scandal in New York. It shut down the court. And my mom was taken away. My mother’s mother lost custody of her in part because of that, because she was accused of being a lesbian. So there was all this stuff in my mom’s head about, about that.