Andy Cohen Honored on Variety's Power of Pride 2020 List
Mazels to the WWHL host, who also made the list along with BFF Anderson Cooper!
All the mazels go out to for Andy Cohen this Pride Month. The Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen host has made Variety’s Power of Pride 2020 List.
Other honorees this year include a mix of tech folks, media personalities, and celebrities, including Andy's BFF and new dad Anderson Cooper, Tim Cook, Lil Nas X, Rachel Maddow, Wanda Sykes, and Da Brat, in addition to other folks from across show business, media and tech. You can check out the list here.
Andy previously opened up about his coming out in an interview with Joy Behar on Current TV back in 2012. It happened after he went to Boston for college.
"The bottom line is I ultimately got the power through some friends that I came out to then come out to my parents. It was one of the scariest things that I've ever done. I'll never forget that day. I left the letter actually out which I didn't mean to, and my mom found it ... The letter was to a friend of mine in London who I came out to ... she [his mother] came and said, 'I think you have something to tell me.' I said, 'I don't want to tell you,' and she said, 'you have to,' and I said, 'well, you know.' She said, 'you have to say the words so that you can say it. So I said it, I'm crying, crying, and about an hour later she said, 'You know I would have hated your wife anyway.'"
Once he found himself on-air at Bravo, he came out in front of the cameras about a decade ago.
He wrote in an essay for O Magazine last year: "And then, I remember when I had to come out on TV. It was during the first [The] Real Housewives of New Jersey reunion in 2009, and Teresa Giudice’s husband [Joe Giudice] said something that Danielle Staub thought was homophobic, or disrespectful to gays. We had a conversation about it, and Teresa said it wasn’t offensive. I said — and this is way before I started inserted myself into anything — 'Look, I have to say, I’m the only gay guy in the room. I am gay, and it was not comfortable to me.' At the time, it was kind of a big deal, because I hadn’t come out publicly on TV. This was way before Watch What Happens Live, and I guess I had never said it. Weirdly, that was kind of my 'public' coming out."
In the years since, Andy has become an outspoken activist and member of the LGBTQ community, working to effect real change across a number of important and personal social issues.
