Is Anderson Cooper Coming Out For February Sweeps?

There was some heat in the blogosphere on this potential story back in mid-December, when Gawker reported that CNN's Anderson Cooper brought his longtime boyfriend to his holiday party.  A flurry of speculation followed as to a potential coming out episode that would be a part of his daytime talk show.  Since then however, there have not been any new rumors or actual facts. But now that today is February 1st and sweeps are upon us, it seems time to ask the question again and be on the lookout for more clues.

The rumors about Cooper's public coming out began last summer and then heated up in November, when the thinking was he would do it to boost ratings for that sweeps period.  His show has not been doing that great so a week-long Anderson Comes Out extravaganza would certainly garner some eyeballs.  However, Cooper has kinda/sorta been living as a gay man and is seen out on the town with his man (Ben Maisani, above in sunglasses), even though he hasn't publicly made any statement on the subject.  Kathy Griffin certainly has tried to do it for him on their New Year's specials!

Anyway, it would be nice to have Cooper make it official, as some another news anchor did recently.  And, at the least, this sort of gesture for The Gays would do a lot to make up for the embarrassing promo-mercial for Spiderman he did in the middle of CNN's New Years broadcast. That was awful!