Anderson Cooper comes out

"The fact is, I'm gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn’t be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud," Anderson Cooper writes in an email that he agreed to have published on The Daily Beast.

Cooper's acknowledgment comes in response to a conversation with his longtime friend blogger-commentator Andrew Sullivan about Entertainment Weekly's recent cover story about the matter-of-fact way people in the public eye reveal their homosexuality these days. Cooper writes that despite being a public figure he's tried to maintain a level of privacy for professional reasons. A journalist shouldn't be the story, he's long said.

"Recently, however, I’ve begun to consider whether the unintended outcomes of maintaining my privacy outweigh personal and professional principle," he tells Sullivan. "It’s become clear to me that by remaining silent on certain aspects of my personal life for so long, I have given some the mistaken impression that I am trying to hide something — something that makes me uncomfortable, ashamed or even afraid. This is distressing because it is simply not true."

Read more at The Daily Beast.