In a recent interview, CNN anchor
Anderson Cooper said that he “immediately regretted” how he came
out gay to his famous mother Gloria Vanderbilt.
Cooper and Vanderbilt's relationship is
the subject of an upcoming book, The
Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son Talk About Life, Love and
Loss, and an HBO documentary, Nothing
Left Unsaid, which premieres on the premium cable network on
Saturday, April 9.
Cooper
told PEOPLE that he came out to himself at 11, but waited 10
years before telling his mother.
“I came out to my friends in high
school, but it wasn't until I was 21, I think, that I came out to my
mom,” he said. “And it was interesting, because we had never
discussed it after I'd come out. She accepted it and met boyfriends
I had and life continued, but we never talked about the actual moment
that I had come out to her because we both had different perceptions
and understandings of what I had said.”
Cooper, 48, said that he “immediately
regretted” how he came out to his mother, saying that including the
phrase “I think I am” led to a sense that his mother perceived
his identification as a gay man as an uncertainty.
Vanderbilt, 92, shocked her son during
the taping by revealing that she had a brief relationship with a girl
at 13.
“What?? Hello? This is news to me,”
Cooper said.
“We had this sort of lesbian
relationship and it felt so great,” she
said.
Vanderbilt's mother, Gloria Morgan
Vanderbilt, lost custody of her daughter amid accusations that she
was a lesbian. The custody battle made national headlines in 1934.
Vanderbilt told PEOPLE that her mother dated men and women.
“I thought, 'Have I inherited this?'
I worried about it for many many years until I knew I was interested
in boys and then I resolved it,” she said.