Gloria Vanderbilt Dishes On Teenage ‘Lesbian Relationship,’ Shocks Son Anderson Cooper

Gloria Vanderbilt, unbeknownst to her son Anderson Cooper, once had something of a lesbian relationship.

Gloria Vanderbilt Lesbian Relationship

During a sit-down interview to promote a memoir Cooper and Vanderbilt wrote about her life, the heiress indicated that she had engaged in a same-sex romance as a young teen.

“I, myself, when I went to [school in] Farmington, [Connecticut] I went through a brief so-called lesbian relationship with a girl in school,” she said.

Interjecting, the CNN reporter said, “What? Hello! … This is news to me. You didn’t mention this in the book, mum.”

Unfazed by her son’s confusion, Vanderbilt went on, “Cynthia, her name was, and she came once to visit my aunt in New York on holiday. We had this sort of lesbian relationship and it felt so great. It felt so good and yet I thought, ‘There’s something about this,’ and this is before the thing I knew about my mother,” Vanderbilt said, referring to rumors about her mother possibly being a lesbian. “I thought, ‘No, this is something that’s not really what I want.’ It was very brief.”

“I think almost everybody goes through it at one point,” Vanderbilt added. “Of course, the thing is, now we realize there’s no difference. Love is love.”

Cooper, after he got over the surprising revelation about his mother, stated that Vanderbilt had long held a “love is love” view, even referring to a gay couple with whom she was friends as a “married couple” before such a marriage were possible. It was Vanderbilt’s progressiveness on the matter that made Anderson, who came out publicly in 2012, confident that his mother would accept his own sexuality.

The HBO documentary about Cooper and Vanderbilt will air April 9. Their memoir, The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son Talk About Life, Love, and Loss, is due out April 5.