Coming out shouldn't be a shocker

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July 5, 2012

Coming out shouldn't be a shocker

Anonymous Daily Star The Daily Star Thu Jul 05, 2012, 03:25 AM EDT

Anderson Cooper came out from halfway in the closet Monday, announcing in an interview with The Daily Beast columnist Andrew Sullivan that the CNN journalist is gay.

"The fact is," said Cooper in an email exchange with Sullivan, himself openly homosexual, "I'm gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn't be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud."

The news wasn't exactly a shock to a lot of folks, as rumors have swelled around Cooper for years, but this is the first time he has publicly acknowledged his sexual orientation.

"I have always been very open and honest about this part of my life with my friends, my family and my colleagues," Cooper said. "In a perfect world, I don't think it's anyone else's business, but I do think there is value in standing up and being counted. I'm not an activist, but I am a human being and I don't give that up by being a journalist."

Cooper is correct, of course. In a perfect world, it really isn't anyone else's business.

Unfortunately, we don't yet live in that perfect world, but it's a darned sight better one than it used to be.

In 1895, Great Britain threw into prison its most gifted living wordsmith, Oscar Wilde, for committing homosexual acts, or "the love that dare not speak its name."

At the first of his two trials, he was asked by a prosecutor what the term meant to him.

"It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect," Wilde included in his eloquent reply. "It dictates and pervades great works of art ... It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as 'the love that dare not speak its name,' and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. ... There is nothing unnatural about it."

Wilde was prosecuted under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, the same asinine law that still existed in 1952, when one of the genuine code-breaking heroes of World War II, Alan Turing, was prosecuted for being gay.

Turing, considered by many to be the "father of computer science," was forced to take female hormones (chemical castration) or go to prison. He died in 1954 from cyanide poisoning, a probable suicide.

In some parts of the world, homosexual acts are still punishable by imprisonment or death.

Happily, Cooper, son of heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, doesn't face prison or any substantial opprobrium in this country just for being gay. He can continue to make $11 million a year working at his job in front of millions of viewers who don't care who might share his bed.

And that's the way it ought to be.