Anderson Cooper Is Leaving CBS News’ ’60 Minutes’ After Nearly 20 Years — Details

As previously reported, Anderson is raising two young boys in an arrangement that defies convention but works by design.

Anderson was twelve years old when he realized he was gay. From that moment on, he believed fatherhood was out of reach. “When I was 12 years old and knew I was gay and thought about my life, it always upset me because I thought, ‘I will never be able to have a kid,'” he would later reveal.

It was a conclusion shaped by the time he grew up in, long before surrogacy and same-sex parenting became part of mainstream public life. He publicly came out decades later, in 2012, in an email to journalist Andrew Sullivan, writing, “I’ve always known I was gay from the time I was a little kid.”

Still, the idea of having children never crossed his mind. The change only came in his early fifties, when he decided to pursue fatherhood through surrogacy.

Introducing His Son to the World

On April 30, 2020, Anderson ended his CNN broadcast with personal news: he had become a father. His son, Wyatt Morgan Cooper, had been born three days earlier, on April 27.