How Gloria Vanderbilt reacted when son Anderson Cooper came out to her

<p>[ew_brightcove videoid="4825091846001" pushTop autoPlay]</p> <p><em>This article originally appeared on PEOPLE.com</em></p> <p>Anderson Cooper didn't publicly come out as gay until 2012, but it was decades earlier that he had the conversation with his mother Gloria Vanderbilt -- a discussion he "regretted" for years.</p> <p>Cooper, now 48, recounted opening up about his sexuality to Vanderbilt, 92, in a recent interview with PEOPLE and Entertainment Weekly editorial director Jess Cagle. The CNN anchor said that his grandmother Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt being "accused" of being a lesbian during the 1930s had a profound impact on Vanderbilt's understanding of same-sex relationships.</p> <p>"I had sort of vaguely heard that my grandmother was a lesbian and had been accused of it and it had been this thing," explained Cooper. "But, when I grew up, my mom had so many gay friends in the house."</p> <p>In particular, it was a performance of Bent, a play about the persecution of gays in Nazi Germany, that opened Cooper's eyes to his own orientation. "I remember going to see the play when I was 11 -- the same year I went to Studio 54 - which was all about two gay men in a concentration camp and it was Richard Gere when he had first come to New York in it. And a friend of my mom's, Paul Jasmine, a photographer who lives in Los Angeles now, took me to it."</p> <p>Despite learning more about himself, Cooper said he couldn't shake the impact of his grandmother's experience on Vanderbilt - and that feeling made him delay coming out.</p> <p>"I came out to my friends in high school, but it wasn't until I was 21, I think, that I came out to my mom," he said. "And it was interesting because we had never discussed it after I'd come out. She accepted it and met boyfriends I had and life continued, but we never talked about the actual moment that I had come out to her because we both had different perceptions and understandings of what I had said."</p> <p>Cooper said he "immediately regretted" including the phrase "I think I am" in his admission, because despite being happy to be gay, the star felt his mother perceived him to be "unsure."</p> <p>Cooper and Vanderbilt, whose memoir, <em>The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son Talk About Life, Love, and Loss</em> will be available from Harper on April 5, and HBO documentary April 9, said after the 1934 accusation of her mother, she thought being gay was "something terrible."</p> <p>"I thought, 'Well, maybe I have inherited this terrible thing that people are put in jail for, that's bizarre and not normal and people are freaks if they are,' " Vanderbilt said. "I thought, 'Have I inherited this?' I worried about it for many many years until I knew I was interested in boys and then I resolved it."</p> <p>Now, the designer and author said, she realizes "there's no difference. Love is love."</p> <p>Watch more clips from the interview below.<br /> [ew_brightcove lineupid="4818467338001" playlist_size="6"]</p>