Kathy Griffin “Comes Out” As An Intellect Warns Anderson Cooper
While many consider Kathy Griffin to be an obnoxious loudmouth, this article clearly shows an intellectual side of her that her fans never see. It appears that Ms. Griffin has “come out” as an intellectual.
Published on the Dailybeast read the article in its entirety below
My friend Anderson Cooper is the scion of one of America’s great shipping and railroad families, the Vanderbilts. He’s covered the military coup and eventual unseating of the democratically elected (albeit bat-shit crazy) Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He’s covered the small wars in Africa that use children as slave soldiers. He knows more about the women of The Real Housewivesthan perhaps even I do. He’s covered the seemingly endless large wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And by “covered,” I mean he’s really gone and covered them—with a security detail and without; embedded with troops and unilaterally—not from the relative safety of the Green Zone in Baghdad or the international zone in Kabul. He’s sat down with despots in countries like Somalia, covered the atrocities in the Balkans and Burma. And he also happens to be gay.Funny thing, that Kicking around for as many years as I have, I’ve done countless interviews pushing Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List, stand-up comedy specials, live comedy dates, the Kathy show, and everything in between. I’ve talked to everyone from a local gay blogger toTime magazine. I’m not really sure at what point it changed, but the press—or at least the press who covered my little carnival—became fixated on Anderson’s orientation. And for years, I talked around it.
Believe it or not, I don’t “out” people. It is neither my business nor my desire. Remember, folks, I am a comedian, not a journalist. These weren’t questions where I could make a joke about Ryan Seacrestgetting a mani/pedi. This isn’t a joke I make about whether Oprah and Gayle are gay lovers. I have no idea if Oprah and Gayle are gay lovers. I doubt they are, but as a comedian, I find some comedy in picturing those two girls running the world as a power couple. Anderson is someone who has led a very specific kind of professional life, who never talked and simultaneously exhibited social contradictions. And quite frankly, he never gave me permission to speak about something that represented the one part of his life he was not comfortable having confirmed in the media. But in my dealings with a certain sector of the press, that simply was never good enough.
Anderson Cooper’s most dramatic moments reporting from the field.
So while I’ve tried to protect my friend and represent him the way he would most prefer, I was never exactly clear on just how to do it, how to say it. One year, while in the middle of doing several interviews to promote New Year’s Eve Live on CNN, I had a discussion with Anderson about it. “For Christ’s sake, Anderson, I’ve been getting asked as much about your sexuality as I have about my own show!” I said.
He said: “Kathy, I don’t get asked as much about my sexuality as you get asked about my sexuality. But here’s my standard party line: ‘I want to report the news. I don’t want to be the news.’”
I recently read an article that quoted a gay Army officer friend of mine saying how freeing on so many levels the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy has been, that he and his now legally married husband might someday finally adopt and begin a family. The “ethical nonstarter” of having to teach a child to lie so that she might protect her fathers was no longer even a glancing consideration. Well, there is an unspoken kind of DADT among the press, and Anderson’s party line only revealed part of it.
The reality is that despite the very real, the very necessary, and the very life-changing progress we have made in this country in treating people across the sexual orientation spectrum with dignity and respect, America—the world—is not fully represented by Chelsea in New York City. It’s not fully represented by DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C.; the Castro; or West Hollywood. Hell, it’s not even Ft. Lauderdale and its Wilton Manors or Denver’s Capital Hill neighborhood. America is, in large part, small towns like Oxnard, Calif. It’s Sevierville, Tenn. It’s Laramie, Wyo. And it’s Wichita, Kan., where I was eating recently at a local diner and a patron asked me, “Kathy, how do you deal with so many goddamned fags?”
Many of my young gays don’t know about Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” initiative, which was developed with the help of some extremist American evangelicals. Many don’t know about Stonewall or, more recently, the importance ofLawrence v. Texas. They don’t know about Cuba’s jailing of HIV patients or even that Iran has sentenced gay teenagers to death by hanging. They don’t know that in large portions of Baghdad, honest LGBT folks are hunted and summarily executed by roving bands of so-called morality police, who kill with impunity both the “out” and those simply perceived to be gay. What many young people do know is what they read in short bursts on celebrity Twitter posts or on TMZ. And what they read and see is how freeing being honest can be. What they don’t see is that it remains, in many places, very dangerous to do just that. And that dichotomy is deeply troubling to me.
