Anderson Cooper Wants to Let Loose with You

Anderson Cooper talks empathy, privilege, queerness, and desensitization ahead of an uncensored night in Ft. Lauderdale with Andy Cohen, where audiences can get to know the unfiltered, uninhibited versions of them.

Anderson Cooper is no stranger to South Florida. As one of the most well-known television news reporters in the 21st century, he’s come here to cover our abundance of headline-making events, from hurricanes to mass shootings. But when he comes with Andy Cohen next week it will be for an uncommon reason: to have fun and let loose.

The pair are coming to host AC2: An Intimate Evening with Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen, an event promised to be uncensored, unscripted, and unforgettable. They’ll share drinks and conversation with guests at the Au-Rene Theater at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts on November 2nd, at 8 p.m.

For Cooper, it is a welcome change of pace and tone.

If there is an enormous tragedy, somewhere around the country or the world, it is more than likely that Anderson Cooper will be there to report it — to repeatedly witness the most painful moments of people’s lives and share it with the rest of the world. And, when he’s finished covering that tragedy, he will move on to the next. It is perhaps why he considers himself not a pessimist, but a catastrophist.

“It’s funny, my mom, who passed away in June, she was the most optimistic person I’ve ever met, like she always believed the next great love was right around the corner, the phone can ring and your whole life can change,” Cooper said.

He said he grew up differently, not inheriting her optimism.

“I want to prepare myself for the next catastrophe that I believe is looming somewhere in the future,” said Cooper.

As a reporter, there isn’t a shortage of catastrophes to cover — his suspicions are almost always confirmed. But still, he said, he finds optimism in the fact that human life is better now than at any point in history, and even when it is ridden with catastrophe, it is easy to find moments of inspiration through the abundance of neighbors and strangers courageously helping each other.

Speaking about his mother is an instance in which the blinds to his soul are often drawn. When she passed away, his tearful exchange with Stephen Colbert, ignited a national conversation around grief, and the beauty that comes with loss.

Although his mother, a beacon of optimism, passed away, she was not his only source of positivity and personal inspiration.

“Andy is incredibly optimistic and happy, and I’m sort of trying to adopt more of his way of seeing things,” said Cooper.

In their duo, it might seem natural that Cohen, the TV personality who hosts “Watch What Happens Live” on Bravo, would be the idealistic romantic, while Cooper remains the stern realist. In some ways, that can be true. Cooper handles the travel arrangements, while Cohen comes up with their social schedule. But, as Cooper shared, people are often surprised by how, without the layers of heavy-hitting news and the constraints of his role as an anchor, relaxed he can be.

“Andy always says that the biggest surprise of the show is people come away surprised at how kind of funny and loose I am when they see us together,” said Cooper.

The pair have been friends for 25 years, long before they started co-hosting CNN’s New Year’s Eve Live. And, they’ve done this show, AC2 together for several years as well, having hosted dozens of shows. The more Cooper revealed, the more it seemed that this tour, this friendship, and connecting with people on a more human level, is how he preserves and fuels the liveliest parts of himself.

For some people, even watching the news too often invokes the fear of becoming numb to human suffering. So, how does Cooper avoid being plagued by desensitization; How does he keep his empathy alive? He says, it’s the only choice.

“It’s something that I think about all the time. I was going to a lot of wars and conflict zones. In the first three years I was doing it, in the early 90s…There’s a risk of becoming desensitized. I noticed it and was very aware of it. It’s something I believe very strongly that you have to fight against it, because as a reporter, you cannot do justice to the people who are letting you into their lives to tell their stories,” said Cooper.

He recalled an image he was sent once: a photographer in Rwanda took a photo of him taking a photo of a dead body during the genocide. The back was inscribed: “This is for when you become famous.” For Cooper, it was sobering. To this day, he keeps it on his wall at work, not because he’s finally famous, but as a reminder to never view people as just dead bodies.

“I realized in that moment, I wasn’t thinking about those people who had died and who had been laying out in the sun, hacked to death, for probably two weeks, and who were in various stages of decomposition. I wasn’t thinking about them as a mother and a child. I didn’t know their names, I didn’t know anything about them, just viewing them as bodies,” said Cooper.

He said desensitization is a big issue with him, and that it’s easy to get caught in that, reporting politics day in and day out, covering the daily outrage, but that it’s important not to; that reporting needs to be done not only with open eyes, but with an open heart.

Since that sobering incident in Rwanda, he’s made sure not to compare tragedies — it doesn’t matter if one war seems worse than another, or if the worst day of someone’s life seems better than another’s — their pain is just as valid, and just as worthy of honoring by reporting with accuracy and sensitivity.

“If you are viewing [their stories] with a jaundiced eye, because you’ve seen so much, you have no business really being there,” said Cooper. “You can’t come to a place where you’re no longer outraged or horrified or angry. When you get to a place where you’re not feeling anything, it’s time to figure out another line of work.”

Fortunately, he is not at that place. He is able to continue his career, covering stories with empathy, and does so as a renowned and celebrated reporter, with wild success.

When asked about privileges that may have helped with that success, Cooper doesn’t shy away from the familiar implication that his lineage helped him get an upper hand in life. He clarifies that his mother was a Vanderbilt who wasn’t close to the rest of her family, and her father grew up poor, on a farm in Mississippi. Still, he knows he grew up with it and benefits from it, but at the same time, he has tried to spend his life elevating the voices of everyone, including those without the same privileges.

“I would always say, ‘I’m not a Vanderbilt, I’m a Cooper,’ and that informs the way I went about, kind of everything. I thought, nothing good could come from the Vanderbilt side. It just seems fraught with privilege,” said Cooper.

He said he wanted nothing to do with it, and knew that after college he didn’t have a pot of gold waiting for him, but certainly benefited from tremendous privilege.

“I think it’s important to recognize one’s privileges that a lot of people just take for granted. I certainly took it for granted for a long time,” said Cooper.

He recalled that he grew up a smug teenager in a private school that wasn’t terribly diverse, and that it wasn’t until he traveled and saw parts of the world dissimilar to his own, did he start to open his eyes and check his own privileges.

“It’s actually very expensive to be poor, which sounds ironic. But, there are structural things that make it extraordinarily difficult,” said Cooper, reminiscing on the ways in which seeing the hardships of others awakened him to the reality of life outside of his bubble.

That awakening led to him to this career path.

“I realized, I want to spend my life traveling and going places and hearing people’s stories and learning from them,” said Cooper.

And he did. He has traveled across the world telling people’s stories on CNN. He has won five Emmy awards. His coverage, and his network, has received enormous praise, as well as criticism. They’ve been on the receiving end of numerous Twitter rants from President Trump, where he repeatedly, and baselessly, calls them “Fake News.” Just last year, a fanatic Trump supporter and domestic terrorist, Cesar Sayoc, mailed pipe bombs and suspicious powders to the network. It was a cautionary tale, and terrifying incident, about what could happen when the media is unjustly vilified by the president.

Yet, not all criticism of CNN is as baseless and fanatic. They’ve been accused of being irresponsible, for letting serial liars such as Kellyanne Conway on air — risking the spread of misinformation for higher ratings. They’ve been accused of having a pro-Biden bias, and not giving enough airtime to other candidates. Just this month, their LGBTQ+ town hall for Democratic presidential candidates was interrupted by protestors, who called the network and others out for not highlighting the plight of black transgender women.

Cooper is no stranger to the criticisms. He has taken on Kellyanne Conway, and many others, in his Ridiculist segment, which is a humorous portion of the AC360 Live Show, that can be snarky. He clarifies that he endorses no political candidates, and does his best to be balanced in their coverage. He celebrated the Human Rights Campaign Town Hall on CNN as milestone for the LGBTQ+ community, but when asked about women like Kiki Fantroy and Bee Love Slater, who were killed in Florida, he also acknowledged that the violence against black transgender women is not covered nearly enough in the media. At the same time, he clarified that he was not an advocate for any political position, but is an advocate for letting people’s stories be told and heard.

“I believe in focusing attention on marginalized communities, all over the world, and, whether it’s conflicts that haven’t been looked at as closely or people’s whose voices have been silenced or whose voices have been ignored, for me as a reporter, that is the thing I feel most drawn to do,” said Cooper, “It’s not giving them a voice, it’s giving them a chance to have their voice heard.”

He acknowledges that there’s always going to be a better job that they can do, in elevating the voices of people who are unheard.

“I certainly understand the desire for people to have more stories told, and I think that’s absolutely fair,” said Cooper.

While Cooper is a white, wealthy, cisgender man, the one area in which he does fall into a traditionally marginalized category is his sexuality. He is a man, who, after coming out 2012, before gay marriage was even legal, became one of the most well-known openly gay news anchors in the world. He refrains from letting it, or any other aspect of his personal life, define him entirely, but he embraces it nonetheless.

Speaking about this topic was something he’d refrained from doing for a large portion of his career, so, hearing him express pride and gratitude in this, was a reminder that Cooper has continued to publicly evolve.

“One of the great blessings of my life was the fact that from a very young age, I knew I was gay,” said Cooper.

Being on the outside of the mainstream, even in just one way, allowed him to see society in a different way, and to be more empathetic.

“I’m super glad I’m gay, and wouldn’t want to change it for the world and, it’s essential to who I am, but certainly, when I was a kid, there were, you know, times when I wished I didn’t feel different from other people. I wished, you know, that I could be just like everybody else, whatever that meant,” said Cooper.

His queerness led to understanding what it means to be different in a more profound way, and that understanding fueled the empathy that drives his reporting.

When he comes to Ft. Lauderdale, he’ll be revisiting one of the most LGBTQ+ friendly cities in America. He’ll also be visiting a place of great contradiction: A place with one of the largest wealth gaps in the country, where diversity and racism thrive simultaneously, where teenagers were shot dead in their classrooms, where police brutality remains an issue, where the 2020 electoral candidates will fight to win over the most Democratic counties in the swing state. He has reported on, and will likely to continue to report on the issues that keep Broward and Palm Beach in the headlines.

But, for one night, he will view the city without the lens of a reporter with the hope that the city can view him in an unfiltered light as well.

As a journalist, he’s navigating the ways to remain sensitive and responsible to the public he serves. As a human, he’s navigating the complexity of contradiction that exists within us. Like all other human beings, within Cooper exists a mind with the capacity to change, be challenged, and evolve. And, like all human beings, it seems that the final, most authentic version of Anderson is still a work in progress.

Perhaps this dualism, and the desire to explore and share the half of him that viewers don’t always see, is why he does this tour, and why he is so looking forward to the event. When guests come, they get to see an unfamiliar side of him — one that is not wrapped in neutrality, politics, or the heaviness of being a constant witness to catastrophe — one that is light, free, and uninhibited.

“It’s the version of ourselves that our friends see,” said Cooper, “It’s a very kind of intimate, loose night.”

When speaking about what brings him joy, this event, and everything that comes with it, was the definitive example.

“Anytime you can be in front of a room of people and be yourself and connect with people and learn something and make somebody laugh, I mean, the night in Ft. Lauderdale, I can guarantee you, will be the most fun I have this month. It will be the most joyful, enjoyable night that I have,” said Cooper.

Coming back to the side of him that peeks out when he’s with Andy Cohen, he expressed affection for his friend, and the new friends he’ll make in Ft. Lauderdale, once again.

“I’m with someone I really love and care for, one of my best friends, and we’re with however many thousand people, or whatever it is, and making people laugh. What could be more joyful than that?”

Tickets for the event can be found at the Broward Center’s AutoNation Box Office, Ticketmaster.com, or charge by phone at 954–462–0222.

A version of this story was first published in the Broward Palm Beach New Times, October 2019.