Are You Listening, Shep?: CNN’s Don Lemon Admits He’s Gay Via Tweet
May 16, 2011 2 Comments ›› Pat Dollard
Excerpted from Mediaite:
In a Twitter posting to his 89,805 followers Sunday night, CNN anchor Don Lemon linked to a New York Times story that reveals he is gay.
“I’m scared,” he said in a telephone interview. “I’m talking about something that people might shun me for, ostracize me for.”
Lemon reveals to Carter that, in addition to the stress of coming out, he worries about acceptance from the black community:
“It’s quite different for an African-American male,” he said. “It’s about the worst thing you can be in black culture. You’re taught you have to be a man; you have to be masculine. In the black community they think you can pray the gay away.” He said he believed the negative reaction to male homosexuality had to do with the history of discrimination that still affects many black Americans, as well as the attitudes of some black women.
“You’re afraid that black women will say the same things they do about how black men should be dating black women.” He added, “I guess this makes me a double minority now.”
