I think about it all the time.
It was 2019, and my roommate and I were watching a CNN town hall on LGBTQ issues. That’s when Joe Biden asked Anderson Cooper—who was hosting the event—if he remembered gay men having “round-the-clock” sex in San Francisco bath houses in the midst of the AIDS crisis.
It was unclear what the point of the question was supposed to be—to me, to my roommate, and probably to Biden himself—especially because Biden followed it up with some comment about gay couples being more likely to stay together than heterosexual ones.
“We’re gonna leave it there, Mr. Vice President,” said Anderson Cooper, who was obviously uncomfortable in a sort of WASPish way. Anderson Cooper may be gay, but he’s still a Vanderbilt, or at least his mother was, and here was some dirtbag on stage screaming about round-the-clock gay sex—one of the finer moments of presidential politics, and one that still gets a chuckle out of me. Others, however, were less enthused—“hilariously off-tone, uncomfortable, and strained” was how Slate described his performance.
