Andy Cohen Comes Clean About Grindr, GLP-1s, and Getting Denied the Gay Channel Job

Andy Cohen got kicked off Grindr. Not banned for bad behavior, not suspended for a terms-of-service violation. Reported. By men who did not believe he was actually Andy Cohen. He has since developed a blurry black-and-white photo specifically engineered to introduce ‘the idea of me without being like me with my cards on Watch What Happens.’ The man runs the most powerful reality franchise on television and he has geolocated a workaround for getting ghosted on a hookup app. This is the Andy Cohen that Call Her Daddy was built for.

What makes this episode work is that Cohen is genuinely a good guest, meaning he has no interest in being managed. He answers things. He texts Lisa Vanderpump live on air about who should get cut from the Beverly Hills cast and her response, delivered in the final seconds of the episode, is ‘all of them.’ He cops to microdosing a GLP-1 this summer and explains that he had to disclose it immediately because he asks every Housewife what they’ve had done and ‘I will be the hypocrite of the universe’ if he stayed quiet. He admits to two rounds of Botox in his forehead and announces he’s considering a third. He is, as he puts it, a man of taste.

I am the only gay man on the planet that has never done… oh no. Amy Sedaris and I did nasal ketamine once before we went to the Polo Bar.

The Job He Didn’t Get

The career origin story Cohen tells here is genuinely good. When Viacom was launching Logo, the gay cable channel, he lobbied hard for the job running it. Didn’t get it. ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ He went to Bravo instead, started blogging as a network executive, got tapped to turn the blog into an aftershow, and Watch What Happens Live was born. His line on this is clean and worth stealing: ‘I wouldn’t be calling you daddy if I got that job.’ Getting rejected from the gay channel made him the most powerful person in gay television. That’s either a cosmic joke or a masterclass in how careers actually work, and Cohen knows it.

He also tells the story of the Real Housewives nearly getting killed before it aired. Season one was struggling in the edit. Someone ran the numbers and the figure that came up was roughly $450,000 in losses if they pulled the plug. His boss at the time shrugged and said she wouldn’t be devastated if it went away. She greenlit it anyway. Cohen has been dining out on that decision ever since, and he knows it: ‘I owe these women everything.’ The franchise that changed basic cable was almost a tax writeoff.

Not getting that job saved my life. I wouldn’t be calling you daddy if I got that job.

The BU-to-Gay-Bar Pipeline

Cohen and Cooper both went to Boston University, a fact this episode treats like a secret handshake. But the more interesting confession is why Cohen chose BU in the first place. He was in the closet and he specifically did not want to join a fraternity because he was afraid of being ‘found out.’ He has since learned, through the testimony of many friends, that fraternities are apparently where significant amounts of gay sex happen. ‘I should have gone to like Indiana or whatever,’ he says, with real regret.

The stretch of this episode covering his early New York years, ripping scripts at CBS at 3am and then going out to video bars on Columbus Avenue at 11pm, has an energy that the professional-Andy portions don’t quite match. He came out in 1988, when, as he puts it flatly, ‘everybody was dying of AIDS.’ Will and Grace wasn’t on. The Real World hadn’t started. His mother told him she was ‘mourning the loss of the life I wanted for you’ and that she probably would have hated his wife anyway. He didn’t believe it when he told her he could still be a dad. She didn’t either. He has two kids now.

I said to her, ‘Well, what was that life?’ And she was like, ‘Well, like you having a family or you being a dad?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I could still be a dad.’ And she didn’t believe what I was selling because it really was not. How was I going to be a dad? That would never happen.

Cohen is a pro at the guest chair, which means he’s occasionally slippery. He won’t name the celebrities he’s blacklisted from Watch What Happens Live. He won’t say whether Brandi Glanville and Caroline Manzo footage exists somewhere in a vault, though he makes clear the decision not to air it wasn’t entirely his. He survives the confess-or-text game by texting Lisa Vanderpump instead of disclosing his salary, which is almost certainly the right call and also extremely funny. But he gives enough elsewhere that the deflections don’t register as evasions. The Grindr stuff alone earns the episode.