Anderson Cooper calls out teabagger leader

Here's Anderson Cooper chatting with the Cowardly Lion from Wizard of Oz, the guy from Sling Blade, and cum goblin Mark Williams on his show last night. First, Williams, the HBIC of teabaggers, compares the racists who come to his racist orgies of racism to gay hippies in San Francisco, which would almost make sense if the gay hippies wanted to kill black people. Then, he says that Obama is an Indonesian Muslim Welfare Thug, and Cooper is all, "Bitch, please."

Please, CNN, keep putting people like Williams on the teevee to "debate." It is so important to show both sides of Hot Button, impossibly complicated issues, such as whether or not it is accurate to call the president a Muslim and whether or not it is appropriate to pray for his death.

Examining the celebrity closet

Photo: Getty Images

Oh, look: Another obviously gay celebrity refuses to acknowledge being gay to the press. This time around, it's Ugly Betty's Michael Urie who's skirting the issue of his sexuality, using the time-honored excuse that outing himself would limit his ability to be thought of objectively as an actor. In a recent interview with New York Magazine, Urie said, "I'm interested in keeping -- you know, actors have to be able to do lots of different things, and while I'd say there's an ongoing theme [to the parts I play], I'm also not interested in having any real publicity about who I am and what my private life is and things like that. I'm an actor and I don't want to be a [fill-in-the-] blank actor."

While we certainly see Urie's point (and, for the record, we agree that every public figure has the right to conduct his or her career in the manner they see fit), we have to ask: When everyone pretty much already knows the actor is gay, does it do him—or his career—any good to continue denying it, or does it just make him look cowardly? After all, Urie identifies himself as "a member of the LGBT community" on his website, and has played a slew of gay roles outside of his role as uber-gay Mark on Ugly Betty: He starred as an emotionally numb homo in the 9/11 drama WTC View and is currently appearing onstage in The Temperamentals, an Off-Broadway play about gay activist group the Mattachine Society. Is Urie's refusal to publicly admit to being a cocksucker really doing anything to make people think of him as any less gay?

Of course, Urie is hardly the only public figure to find himself in the middle of such a debate. Let's examine a few other notable [alleged] closet cases after the jump and see how they stack up.

Richard Simmons tries to get Anderson Cooper to dance with him to Lady Blah Blah

Is admitting to liking Lady Gaga Anderson's way of finally coming out, or does it just prove that he has truly awful taste in music?

He would know

Wait for Anderson Cooper to tell it like it is at the end of the clip.