CNN Primetime Anchor Don Lemon: “I’m Gay”

Don Lemon, the CNN Emmy award-winning primetime anchor reveals in a soon to be released autobiography that he is gay. The 45 year-old African American journalist says, “I guess this makes me a double minority now.”

READ: Maddow: Gay Anchors (But Not Anderson) Have “Responsibility To Come Out”

A veteran newscaster who says he has been out for a long time to colleagues at CNN, also says coming out is a personal journey that must be done on an individual time schedule. But the Atlanta resident, who has anchored in local stations in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Birmingham, and was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, says he believes today’s youth — specifically mentioning Tyler Clementi — needs role gay models.

Lemon, in the fall of 2010, on-air acknowledged he had been a childhood victim of sexual abuse.

“People are going to say: ‘Oh, he was molested as a kid and now he is coming out.’ I get it,” Lemon said in a New York Times interview.

“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.”

“I think if I had seen more people like me who are out and proud, it wouldn’t have taken me 45 years to say it,” Mr. Lemon said, “to walk in the truth.”

“Look around, Lemon said. There are no openly gay U.S. senators, Supreme Court justices or current players in the National Football League or the National Basketball Association — and there are very few top-paid gay or lesbian Hollywood stars,” writes NPR today, which interviewed Lemon also.

Lemon’s CNN biography adds,

“Lemon serves as an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College, teaching and participating in curriculum designed around new media. He has won an Edward R. Murrow award for his coverage of the capture of the Washington, D.C. snipers. He won an Emmy for a special report on real estate in Chicagoland and various other awards for his reporting on the AIDS epidemic in Africa and Hurricane Katrina. In 2006, he won three more local Emmys for his reporting in Africa and a business feature about Craigslist, an online community.

“He earned a degree in broadcast journalism from Brooklyn College. He has also attended Louisiana State University.”

No word on if Lemon is currently in a relationship.