Profiles of Smith from the Observer and New York magazine have hinted at his sexuality in the past, but they've both been reluctant to come right out and say he's gay. But the anchor's new profile on Cityfile sums it up thusly:

Smith has repeatedly dodged the question of his sexuality, but in 2005 he was outed in a column in the Washington Blade. Kevin Naff, the managing editor of the gay weekly, said that Smith "chatted me up in a New York City gay piano bar, bought me drinks, and invited me back to his place." He lives in a two-bedroom West Village loft that he purchased for $1.87 million in 2004. Fashion designer (and fellow gay) Michael Kors lives in the same building.

Fox News has, essentially, a ready-made conservative counterpart for Anderson Cooper just waiting to be promoted correctly. Having Smith as the face of the network could go a long way towards imbuing it with a slightly more open image—a hint of progressivism, with all the staid respectability that the middle American audience expects in its newsmen. And once Obama is elected and the backlash against the Bush years begins in earnest, Fox News will need someone less harsh than Bill O'Reilly to make peace with the national mood.

It is, in all seriousness, a fine idea. Fox News should give it some consideration.

[Huffpo, CityFile, Previously]

• Cooper is spendy: "It has been rumored that in one year they spent about 27 million dollars in advertising of Anderson Cooper in their experiment. No network has ever spent that kind of money just to market one person. By the way, the President of CNN told me that Anderson Cooper has a staff of nearly 60. We beat them with our staff…of about 12." Cooper has led in ratings share the past two quarters; Van Susteren is ahead in Nielsen's separate count of total viewers (as opposed to households).
• Cooper is a commercial whore: "hey have even done some rather bizarre (demeaning?) marketing. They have put Anderson Cooper on plastic bags like they are selling breakfast cereal. Here is another example and you decide: CNN sells T shirts of Anderson Cooper not just promoting the show (all networks sell T shirts) but [also of the headline "Anderson Cooper, 'you're not my boo']. Not my boo? yikes…not exactly Walter Cronkite…"
• Cooper exploited Katrina! "You would think with all their marketing that Anderson Cooper was the only one who covered Katrina….we were there, all producers were there, all my colleagues were there…but guess what? so was every one else in every news outlet in the nation!! The fact is that all the other news organizations had the dignity not to try and make a marketing experiment out of a giant catastrophe! Only one anchor wrote a book and thus collected money from Katrina. The rest of us saw the suffering and simply reported it rather than exploit it." Anderson did not write a Katrina book, thank you very much. The dreamy anchor kept a "diary." Totally different.
• Cooper needs a teleprompter, because he didn't go to law school: "Plus, unlike those on the side lines, I am the real thing - I spent 15 years in the criminal courts trying criminal cases and don’t get my information from a teleprompter…I get it from both investigation and experience."
• Cooper thinks a lot about multiple wives: "It is true….CNN does polygamy better. I will give that to them — but it is because they have so much more experience with the polygamy story than any other network. They were obsessed with it…night after night after night…even assigning multiple correspondents to the story to report only for Anderson Cooper."

I don't know — that's pretty harsh, even though Cooper's producer did throw down some fighting words. Susteren's response even drew out feelings of kinship with the CNN anchor from right-leaning internet publisher Matt Drudge. Notice how it's not "Cooper," it's "Anderson:"

Do I detect a little wistfulness in that "not my boo" headline, Matt?

[Gretawire, TVNewser]

[CNN]

But there is one amusing angle: Von Furstenberg is of course herself the "wife" of famously closeted tycoon Barry Diller. The fashion designer, who's apparently been blabbing about the assistant's dating coup around town, is more discreet about her own gay's love life. Anyway, can anybody help identify the assistant? Clue: the silver-haired CNN anchor likes the Latins.

Happy Birthday Anderson! I love you and your show and the fact that you're a Gemini like me is even BETTER!!

Anderson Cooper looks just like Larry King.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MR. COOPER,

YOU ARE ONE OF MY FAVORITE JOURNALISTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

CONTINUE TO BE BLESSED!

The lunch went until cocktail time and on my way home I stopped by a store opening in East Hampton. Kelly Ripa and Marc Consuelos were the "hosts" of the party, but the store is owned by Sam Champion's boyfriend. Neither of the Champions seemed to be around for the first 90 minutes of their own party, and so the topic of conversation inside the party became: If you are the host of a party (and not the "host") and your name is not "Madonna", is it appropriate to make an "entrance" or be there from the start? People seemed to be split on the etiquette. (I will ask Da Countess sometime.)

There were so many pretty girls dolled up in great clothes and shoes who were single and seemingly looking. And they were surrounded by gay guys, which ultimately has got to get quite tiresome for those pretty girls. We need a shipment of straight men to the metro area pronto to right this wrong.

Most likely, Cohen was unaware that Champion keeps his sexuality hushed. But it's also possible the Good Morning America weatherman has decided to speak more openly about his relationships now that he's going into business with his boyfriend — in the high-profile retail sector, no less. If that's the case, who better for Champion to open up to than a fellow gay television insider who will help him inch his way out of the closet via a low-key mention in a blog post about parties? You don't get those sort of kid gloves in, say, Page Six.

[Bravo]

"I never put inappropriate pictures of myself on a public website. For me it was really hurtful, for Patrick and I it was terribly painful, and I'm sure anyone reading this will realize that what happened was something that we needed to deal with on a personal level. And we've dealt with it — we've closed the book on that issue and moved on."

I guess if you want to get technical about it, Julia Allison is employed by a magazine. But her main occupation is fameball. So when I saw her, in a white dress, dramatically posing for photos as if she was getting married, it made me question whether these magazine awards were supposed to be some sort of society event. Apparently so! The following people showed up to present awards, for no discernible reason whatsoever:

• Anderson Cooper. Who did not say anything gay.
• Former New Yorker editor and current Clinton family stalker Tina Brown. "She looks like Hillary," someone whispered loudly when she appeared.
• The aforementioned Padma Lakshmi. She said some stuff about her food show, too.
• Former baseball star turned investor turned magazine publisher Lenny Dykstra. Though he can't be 50 years old yet, he shuffled, mumbled, and spoke with his mouth an inch from the mike in a disquieting impression of Muhammad Ali in the throes of Parkinson's disease. Or maybe it wasn't an impression.
• Obama girl.
• New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. Who, after the ceremony, was deep in conversation with New Yorker editor David Remnick. A conversation I imagine going like this:

  KELLY: Congratulations on the award.

  REMNICK: Thanks. Coincidentally, we're going to be doing an investigative piece on the NYPD soon.

  KELLY: You are under arrest.

• Judah Friedlander and two other people from 30 Rock. They also made awkward, jokey attempts to somehow tie their show to the magazine industry. Not their fault, though. My guess is they were just as mystified that they were there as anyone else.
• Charlie Rose

The "Nick Denton Could Make This A Metaphor" moment of the night: Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman, after receiving an award, tried to walk off stage the wrong way, and had to turn around and double back.

And here, the night in poor pictures. I'm having some trouble aligning them correctly, so I will put the captions here, and the pictures below. 1. The view from the ballroom, and also what this crowd of media honchos controls: the world. 2. Here, Anderson Cooper, live on stage! It's really him, I promise! 3. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly walks away from me in fear after I challenge him to a debate on media consolidation laws. 4. Fameball Julia Allison and New York Magazine writer Vanessa Grigoriadis, whose article about this site was nominated for an award last night. They're both very personable!

That's about it.

Oh, yeah. But Americans have an exaggerated sense of danger about New York City.

I'm also not a good person to ask, because my sense of what's dangerous is completely warped. People have stopped asking me for advice, because I encourage people to go anywhere. It really pissed me off, two summers ago, during the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, when Depeche Mode canceled their concert in Tel Aviv. For security reasons!

I don't understand why more artists don't go and entertain the troops. I mean, hasn't Jessica Simpson been over there? I saw this documentary on Marlene Dietrich, and during World War II she was going out, right to the front lines. I think she was having sex with a lot of the troops, too. I'm not saying artists should do that. But she took supporting the troops to a level that few have since.

[Soup Cans]

Video via Anderson Cooper Effects:

Wallpaper via Anderson Cooper Effects, which today wrote:

When in doubt, make collages of Anderson. When there is no news about Anderson, make collages. When idle, make collages of Anderson... When I am in all three instances, I make collages of Anderson. Enjoy!

See? That's how you have a healthy Anderson Cooper obsession.

• Blogger Perez Hilton is claiming he made out with a bisexual John Mayer. This disturbing visual comes a few days after singer Mayer posted a long rambling thing to his blog "about a young guy who maintains a celebrity blog... who has wrestled with a lifelong battle for acceptance as a gay man." [Perez] (Photo via Perez)
• OK! Magazine wanted to do a big cover story on Britney Spears' miraculous weight loss, but Brit was too fat or ravaged looking or something, so the magazine just substituted a four-year-old photo instead and implied it was a new shot of Spears "back to her old body." [Huffington Post]
• CNN anchor Anderson Cooper bought some pairs of the Armani underwear touted by soccer champ David Beckham, size small. Cooper had just interviewed Beckham for 60 Minutes and asked Beckham to sign one of his Armani ads. So precious. [AC Effects]
• Actress Lindsay Lohan is not being cooperative about recording her new album. [Daily News]
• Mayor Michael Bloomberg can't stop talking about how he got a table at Waverly Inn the other night. Sad. Tuesday at 10:30? Thought so. [Daily News]
• Chelsea Handler of E! said she really loves boning her boss, or her boss' boss or whatever. [P6]
• Singer Bobby Brown said ex-wife Whitney Houston, the soul diva, got him into coke. [P6]
• Ed Westwick of Gossip Girl was a drunken cad at Beatrice Inn. Guy knows how to stick to the script. [P6]
• To "not deal with the media," movie star Brad Pitt got rid of his publicist. Wife Angelina Jolie's crafty mind is, of course, behind the whole, uh, ingenious plot. [P6]

Earlier: Becks and The Coop: This Sunday on '60 Minutes'

Bell County's new line beats the original, I Know What Made Tim Gunn Sad Last Night.

AfterElton's Christie Keith identifies a new-ish trend-ish thing among gay celebrities that she calls "inching out of the closet." The perfect example: Neil Patrick Harris, who was openly gay to anyone who met him, but who didn't come out "publicly" until his publicist inexplicably denied the "rumor." Harris went public in People shortly afterwards, to the surprise of very few people, and with no harm to his career. Sir Ian McKellen did a similar thing, but it took him a couple more decades. Jodie Foster and David Hyde Pierce still haven't gone explicitly "public," though they have at least acknowledged having same-sex "partners."

The debate is whether famous people owe it to "the movement" to work to advance national tolerance, perhaps at the expense of their privacy and even careers. There's not a particularly good way to answer that question, but with each celeb to do it, it seems to become a bit easier for the next one. And the fact is that Cooper is already obviously, openly working for acceptance among mainstream America of their gay family and neighbors.

But, as Keith says: "There is nothing more strongly correlated with increased support of gay rights among straight people, from marriage to adoption to opposing a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, than one simple thing: knowing someone who is gay."

Which is why we are pretty sure Coop will drop the last vestiges of the "act" fairly soon.

And we're sorry we made fun of him so much. Except for the time he acted all scared of Kelly Ripa.

Inching Out of the Closet [AfterElton]

Long staples of the gossip industry, it now appears that blind items will soon become relics due to the increasing power of the Google. Let's take an example from today's Page Six: "WHICH local reporter got sick to his stomach after he found out the Penthouse Pet with whom he'd been making out had just had sex with another man?"

In the old days, such an item would inspire a bunch of you to sit around your office's water cooler, a popular destination for gossip, and speculate back and forth about who the subject might be. In the modern age, though, we just enter the key terms into the Google—"New York reporter sick Penthouse Pet"—and bingo, up pops our answer, right after the original Post item:

It was Anderson Cooper all along. Do you now understand how the internet combines the accuracy of whispered office rumors with the quick reaction time of a wild, unrestrained mob, thirsty for blood (answers) no matter what the cost? Let's try another blind item, this one from Michael Musto: "Which top anchor is a bottom?" We have a theory, so we'll check it with the Google's robotic memory of wisdom:

The very first answer. It's not necessary to add much to that. Here we see that Google, the smartest technology in the universe, tells us that Anderson Cooper is the answer to all blind items. Not much point to continuing the practice from now on. Let's all turn our attention to loftier pursuits.

1. If you’ve been contacted by authorities and asked not to attempt to contact me further… but you still do, there’s a good chance you’ve crossed the line.

2. If you’ve attempted to gain entry to my apartment under false pretenses, and can’t imagine why that might be inappropriate, that’s another red flag.

3. If you believe I am secretly communicating to you online, or with the clothes I wear, or by telepathy through your radiator, that’s a problem as well.

4. If you have read the last three items and laughed, or said, “wow, that’s weird” you are not a stalker.

5. If you have read items 1-3 and notice they apply to you, but then tell yourself they actually don’t apply to you. Well, that’s not good.

See, not so bad! You're probably just crushing, not stalking.

Thankfully for Anderson Cooper Effects — and for Gawker — there's no last item like...

6. If you have blogged about me 19 times or more so far this year, get help. And maybe? A life.