On Thursday, a month and change after Andrew Cuomo announced a stay-at-home order for New York, Real Housewives of New York City player Sonja Morgan was asked by Page Six if she’d consider dating him. Not necessarily: “I think someone a little more behind the scenes is for me.” The same day, Cuomo said that he is “eligible” in an interview with the New York radio station 1010 WINS, unlike his brother, the CNN anchor Chris, who’s become a tabloid mainstay during the pandemic in his own right: “Now that you raise it, most wanted eligibility, my brother is married, I am not married. So I don’t think he would qualify as eligible. However, I am eligible.”
Since this genre of Cuomo admiration emerged early in New York’s coronavirus crisis, and was widely documented, criticized, and embodied in the media, it’s often been accompanied by caveats about the governor’s record or his handling of the pandemic. Jezebel’s formative entry in the canon framed it in terms of Stockholm syndrome. “I know his history is very spotty,” Chloë Sevigny told The Cut last week, after admitting to being
“one of those crushing-on-Cuomos.” “But I will say, tuning in to those press conferences every day has been very calming for me.”
Meanwhile, Cuomo continues to stoke the phenomenon himself. “Can I say that I am a Cuomosexual?” Ellen DeGeneres asked him on Thursday, noting that Trevor Noah was an early, enthusiastic adopter of the phrase. “You know that that’s going around, that people are saying they’re Cuomosexuals?”
“Yeah, I think that’s a good thing.” Cuomo responded. He also called Rebecca Fishbein, the author of the Jezebel piece, to tell her he’d read her article.
The crushes have arrived alongside the governor’s celebrity treatment. Multiple investigations have been launched into whether Cuomo has nipple piercings. His ex-girlfriend Sandra Lee has been sought out for commentary. His bomber jackets and polo shirts have been decoded, and there’s street art depicting him as Superman in Manhattan’s East Village. Magazines like this one have resurfaced old pictures of Cuomo in lively patterned shirts in Queens—his home borough, as he’s known to point out.
In this difficult time for celebrities, when they’re either silent at home or making mistakes from it, maybe it’s no wonder that Cuomo—and Anthony Fauci and his button-down collars, or Deborah Birx and her Hermès scarves—have come to occupy such space in the popular imagination. Whether you see this as a harmless distraction—what’s not to like about a crisp polo and a no-nonsense PowerPoint?—or a loathsome commingling of politics and celebrity—remember Rudy Giuliani after 9/11?—will vary, but on month two it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
Nonetheless, the gleeful, semi-winking fanfare is one of the stranger turns Cuomo’s career has taken. For all his tough-guy claims to a common touch, plenty of New Yorkers remember his meticulously staged Kennedy wedding; plenty of New Yorkers still hate him. Maybe a media darling is just that: An Independent story on Friday looked at Instagram Cuomo adoration, citing @cuomo.sexual and @cuomocrush and noting that the first has over 7,000 followers—not a rounding error, but not earth-shattering either.
But if the specter of Cuomosexuals has been overstated, the preemptive reaction is understandable. As long as he remains a face of the crisis—as long as there is a crisis in New York—the minimal hope is that he can go back to being the lower-key scourge of the MTA and Bill de Blasio. It’s been a long spring since the “Imagine” video, and it could be a longer Cuomo summer.
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