Culture Vultures: Everybody Out!
Stevn, Mark
CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn Everybody Out! T hree or four years ago in Britain, on a Sunday Times survey of "funny people," I found myself directly under Ellen DeGeneres—which is not something...
...As for "Ellen," Disney and ABC will crunch their numbers and figure whether her re-orientation has worked...
...There have been lesbians in Hollywood since at least Janet Gaynor (who sang "Keep Your Sunny Side Up"), but not like this...
...In both cases, the populace cowered nervously before "a vast network of dykes...
...There's a reason why Lucille Ball plays a character called Lucy, and Mary Tyler Moore plays Mary, and Roseanne plays Roseanne—successful sitcoms aren't about acting so much as projecting a recognizable and truthful part of yourself...
...Eleanor Roosevelt can't be seen in her stole, FDR can't be seen with his cigarette holder...
...ABC News, in fact, is literally homosexual: they're erotically aroused only by people exactly the same as them—other media celebrities...
...In other news, John Major led Britain's Conservative Party to electoral defeat, no doubt because he lacked the courage to come out as a lesbian...
...Between their annual "Gay Day" and their same-sex employee benefits, Disney is in the forefront of the drift towards formal recognition of gay relationships...
...Are you coming out or not...
...ABC loves hard news, can't get enough of it, the more the better, show it a hard news story and it can't wait to dive undercover Ellen DeGeneres ignites lesbian fever...
...The "news" magazines weren't alone in recognizing the earth-shattering nature of the event...
...So ABC cast around for other bogeymen...
...T hree or four years ago in Britain, on a Sunday Times survey of "funny people," I found myself directly under Ellen DeGeneres—which is not something many guys can claim...
...Rival programs even featured the actress who plays her mother, talking about how she reacts when she learns the truth in the following episode...
...Although I was pretty lesbianed out by the time the show aired, I actually found the episode sweetly endearing...
...Most of us —gay, straight, or swing voters would be appropriately awed at meeting the leader of the free world: even this one...
...But then, given that the Roosevelt memorial was dedicated at the height of Ellen fever, we should be grateful that activists didn't insist on chiseling a statue of Anne Heche and her wandering hands on Eleanor's lap...
...But maybe lesbianism has become the alternative lifestyle that squares can dig, too...
...I'm African-American" and "Helmut Kohl: Ja...
...Of4...
...Quite...
...The headline actually referred to the Red River defenses, but by this stage most of us assumed it was ABC-TV launching its fall schedule...
...7 7 with the allegedly pro-family Disney said to be considering nixing the move...
...A day or two before, on Channel 3 in Burlington, Vermont, an "Entertainment Tonight" story The American Spectator • June 1997 49 on Ellen and Anne's latest night out was interrupted by two louche young men in tuxes and a couple of beefy women in bridal gowns in what appeared to be a commercial for gay marriage...
...lang...
...And after eight months of "will she?/won't she...
...That said, "identity" is increasingly narrowly defined...
...isn't it about time...
...yells her flatmate through the closet wall...
...But it was ABC's willingness to conscript its entire news output in the service of puffing "Ellen" that was most brazen...
...I'm German...
...from the star, her network, and her producers, Time magazine's cover two weeks ago ("Yep...
...Religious groups were invited to comment, but were apparently too preoccupied with such drearily parochial issues as abortion and African famine to rise to the bait over a TV sitcom...
...You've been in there forever...
...On the coming-out episode, the character at last began to swim into focus...
...In one, the president is trying, as usual without success, to look presidential...
...He too has been confused about his identity—sometimes left, sometimes right, sometimes triangulating all over the map according to the whims of his sponsors and ratings...
...We'll see...
...A message from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints...
...Take ABC News: for years it has insisted that, to paraphrase Mae West, hard news is good to find...
...There were two types of photos taken to mark the occasion...
...And, like Ellen, he's had a bewilderingly high turnover amongst his supporting cast— including a camp queeny minor character (Dick Morris...
...then, at "Come Out With Ellen" parties thrown by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Resource Center—and other groups across the fruited plain—fans of the movie star girlfriend of the actress who plays the sitcom character also came out...
...I was thinking," Diane Sawyer told Ellen on "20/20," wearing her pained expression, "of someone we hadn't heard from in a long time—Vice President Dan Quayle...
...She didn't issue a press release MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic ofthe Spectator of London...
...But no: "Family...
...48 June 1997 • The American Spectator with it, French kiss it and go for a roll in the hay with it...
...in the other, he's grinning like a traveling man who's decided to blow the last night of the convention on the two-girl double-action special...
...Oh, come on...
...In fact, I think we already have a ton of them: a good proportion of the characters on "Leave It To Beaver," "Ozzie And Harriet," "Father Knows Best," and "The Donna Reed Show" can be assumed to be pro-life, Christian and Republican...
...And at least they had fun making jokes about gays, which is more than those grimly earnest news shows do...
...But there's no mistaking who the real stars are in these pies: Miss Heche's left arm is extravagantly entwined around Miss DeGeneres, while the right flaps breezily towards the president in a gesture of exquisite Sapphic disdain— a kind of lez-majeste...
...Ellen, of course, had no shortage of celebrity cheerleaders: the coming-out episode itself boasted Laura Dern, Oprah Winfrey, Demi Moore, Gina Gershon (star of the lesbo-erotic gangster movie Bound) and lesbian singers Melissa Etheridge and k.d...
...For non-lesbians, it was hard to get a look in...
...It began with Ellen getting dressed for a date...
...This was the longest coming-out in history: those Peruvian hostages, the Republic of Texas separatists, the Montana Freemen, the O.J...
...said the announcer...
...Despite good writers and a fine ensemble, the central character has fumbled around in search of an identity...
...At the black-tie White House Correspondents dinner in Washington, Miss DeGeneres and the other half of Hollywood's first out celebrity lesbian couple, Anne Heche, were graciously received by President Clinton...
...Perhaps, in Ellen, Bill recognized a soulmate...
...ABC publicist Jill Lessard came out on the set of "Ellen" after "getting swept up in the moment...
...From the start, the decision to come out was presented as "controversial," By Wednesday, following 'Ellen' herself, they were down to an exclusive interview with her mother...
...I'm Gay") had a news value somewhere between "Jesse Jackson: Yep...
...Miss Heche's agent and managers shared these concerns, so she sacked them and signed on with her girlfriend's representatives...
...but Ellen mentioned it to Chastity Bono, lesbian activist daughter of Sonny and Cher, who then passed it on to Newsweek...
...Lesbians have always been the ugly sisters of the gay movement—left bringing up the rear as their more flamboyant brethren lead the annual "Pride" marches...
...identity is everything...
...Thus, Ellen's coming-out week was also the week ABC News accidentally outed itself as not a journalistic operation at all but just another outpost of the Disney merchandising machine...
...And the rest of us think: hmmm, you're always talking about how much you dig hard news, but when was the last time we saw you with any...
...The Miami Herald hailed Ellen as "a gay Jackie Robinson"—although, in fairness, he'd been black all along, rather than deciding to turn black at the end of the fourth inning...
...So, if only for old times' sake, at the end of April, along with so many Americans, I was effortlessly swept away by the tide of lesbian fever that briefly engulfed the country, much like the swollen Red River as it burst its banks and spilled over the border into Manitoba...
...Her next scheduled onscreen coupling is with Harrison Ford, and executives are known to be concerned as to whether America's second most famous lesbian—the only authenticated sighting of that hitherto mythical species, the "lipstick lesbian" — will be accepted as a heterosexual romantic lead...
...First, it was announced that Ellen the sitcom character would be coming out...
...But there was more than enough lesbian fever to go round...
...So she did...
...B ut then lesbian fever seems to have addled almost everybody's news judgments...
...The photos are, in their way, emblematic of the Clinton administration—like FDR with Churchill and Stalin, or Carter with Begin and Sadat, they perfectly encapsulate the ambitions of his presidency...
...The lesbian publicity blitzkrieg was in the end so successful that there was no one left to come out except the publicist...
...By Wednesday's "Primetime" special, following "Ellen" itself, they were down to an exclusive interview with her mother — "Tonight Betty DeGeneres on the day she learned the truth...
...then, the movie star girlfriend of the actress who plays the sitcom character came out...
...Meanwhile the celebrity lesbians — celesbrities?— can't keep their hands off each other...
...The show was first rumored to be going gay last August...
...on the other hand, he has to be dumped into a wheelchair, or some tunnel-visioned physically-challenged activists' group will be out in force...
...An ABC affiliate in Birmingham, Alabama refused to broadcast the show and several sponsors withdrew, though a lesbian cruise line picked up the slack and, frankly, the blanket coverage was hard for any advertiser to avoid...
...We're so narcissistic these days that even the past has to be shoehorned into our dreary preoccupations...
...And I Do Have One, was even more excruciating, an attempt to talk about yourself without saying anything...
...Indeed, when you compare "Ellen" with ABC News's tacky attempts to foment controversy around it, you see there's no contest: TV's talent, wit, and inventiveness are in the sitcoms—the network news is the home of the unimaginative, pompous, and crass...
...Needless to say, America's chief of state, with his usual opportunist cunning, managed to wangle himself a bit-part in the only story that mattered...
...Anne Heche's coming out is the bolder move: ABC is gambling with a sitcom that's never quite found its feet, but the 27-year old Miss Heche is one of the fastest-rising stars in Hollywood...
...She writhed naked atop Alec Baldwin in The Juror and enjoyed vigorous sex with Johnny Depp in Donnie Brasco...
...Never before has lesbian fever proved so contagious...
...Miss DeGeneres's memoir, My Point...
...Yet alongside Anne and Ellen, Clinton was superfluous—a gooseberry...
...In that sense, April's lesbiana-a-go-go may or may not prove a great advance in "gay integration," but it certainly represents another milestone in America's descent into narcissism—the notion that who we are is all that matters...
...On the following Tuesday's "Primetime," she lent her support to the campaign for gay marriage...
...And it's a measure of how far we've come in forty years that the former vice-president's remarks should be taken by media sophisticates as further evidence of his obvious derangement...
...Ellen" has never had that...
...Dan had nothing to say about "Ellen," but sportingly tossed ABC a tidbit by challenging it to create a show about a pro-life Christian Republican...
...orty-one percent of Americans said F they approved of "Ellen" coming out, forty-four percent disapproved...
...On "20/20," at the urging of an anguished Diane, Ellen revealed her dissatisfaction with heterosexual sex...
...civil jury—all of them came out quicker than Ellen...
...But April 22 was not part of the networks' crucial sweeps ratings period, so the interview was delayed until April 25, when it ran on a sister "news" magazine show, "20/20...
...They pose as ravenous trawlers of the rough trade, cruising the hard-news bars, but they're really just mincing sissies who'd rather kiss up to their own kind...
...For my own part, I'm inclined to modify the old biblical injunction and love the sinner, hate the synergy...
...next, the actress who plays the sitcom character came out...
...So never mind their public agonizing over journalistic ethics in the wake of the Food Lion case, here's ABC ethics in action: Diane Sawyer had done an interview with Ellen DeGeneres which was supposed to run on "Primetime Live" on Tuesday April 22...
...in Zaire, President Mobutu's regime crumbled because of a lack of visible lesbian role models...
Vol. 30 • June 1997 • No. 6
