Why Al Gore Got in Bed with Ellen
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Why Al Gore Got in Bed with Ellen By John Podhoretz On October 16, Vice President Al Gore praised the ABC television show Ellen in a speech before entertainment-industry executives in Los Angeles...
...He was whoring after donations—Hollywood generated an estimated $8 million in soft money for the Democratic party in 1996, while fund-raising ace David Mixner has said that gays gave $3.5 million to the Clinton campaign in 1992...
...People with the right attitudes are more "evolved," they say, than people who hold fast to old and discredited ideas...
...That is why Gore's words—"When the character Ellen came out, millions of Americans were forced to look at sexual orientation in a more open light"— are so telling, and worth examining closely...
...But Gore's critics, anxious to root out hypocrisy and opportunism wherever they find it, have failed to see the deeper significance of his remarks...
...and because the vice president was talking about a television show, his words made the front pages and the nightly news...
...The immediate response was predictable...
...Gay groups hailed the vice president's words...
...So for those who believe, as Gore believes, that America must open itself to homosexuality, the vice president spoke honest, true, and insightful words...
...But for those who believe in forcing the American people "to look at sexual orientation in a new light," Ellen DeGeneres is far more effective than Auden or Wilde...
...Cohen is by no means an orthodox liberal, but when it comes to an issue like homosexual rights, it becomes clear on which side of the bright dividing line in American culture he stands...
...When the character Ellen came out...
...As almost all sitcom plots are about the perils of dating, the problems of marriage, or the trials of parenthood, DeGeneres's show was an especially troubled one...
...It is especially significant that these words were spoken by a heterosexual...
...Her signature line (it became the title of the book she published last year) was, "My point—and I do have one . . ." That line also describes the peculiar journey taken by her television show, which dithered and wandered and rambled for three years until it exploded into the national consciousness just this past April...
...Shouldn't presidents and other top officials aim higher than that...
...Laws supporting liberal views on race, gender, and the environment have been on the books for two decades or more, and the Supreme Court created and has reaffirmed the right to abortion...
...In his wildest imaginings, Auden could never have had such influence...
...Gore is a very careful man, and nowhere in this praise of Ellen does the word "gay," "homosexual," or "lesbian" appear...
...There is no room for a more complex morality—for the Christian idea that God loves the sinner but hates the sin, or the Old Testament pronouncement that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward...
...and the 1983 anti-nuke TV film The Day After...
...It would be difficult to take a clip from the speech and make an advertisement attacking it to sway the unenlightened ears of America's homophobic bigots...
...When the character Ellen came out," Gore said, "millions of Americans were forced to look at sexual orientation in a more open light...
...The only way to change such attitudes is by forcing these unwilling people to "look at" what you want them to look at "in a more open light...
...Gore's words, Richard Cohen wrote in the Washington Post, were "the Kryptonite of bigotry...
...But the very fact that the vice president could use the phrase "came out" and assume that his listeners would know exactly what he meant is an indication of how the private language of the homosexual subculture has become the common language of the cultural elite...
...Millions of Americans were forced to look at sexual orientation in a more open light...
...They can echo popular culture, borrow from it, and enjoy it, but a major speech by a leading political figure really ought to aim higher than that...
...In his view, and the view of millions of others, opposition to homosexual rights is irrational, a form of hatred that should be given no quarter...
...They were, as the criticism of them shows, revealing words—words that exposed the snobbery, the self-appointed superiority, and the contempt that today's liberals feel for those traditionalists who do not believe that morals are subject to evolution...
...That highly publicized episode put DeGeneres on the cover of almost every magazine in America, shot Ellen to first place in the ratings for the first time, and won her an Emmy...
...Cohen criticizes the vice president for this "inelegant" sentence, but he is wrong to do so...
...If the vice president is looking for explicitly gay works of art to celebrate, he could talk about W. H. Auden or Oscar Wilde...
...Almost every sitcom now seems to have a gay character in a supporting role, and gay characters have been the subject of innumerable television movies since That Certain Summer broke the ice in 1972...
...It was stupid to do this," George Stephanopoulos said...
...Gore is still the frontrun-ner for the Democratic nomination, but his poll numbers have tumbled in recent months, and he is bound John Podhoretz is deputy editor of The Weekly Standard and the incoming editor of the New York Post's editorial pages...
...It was the sort of speech that clarifies the distinctions between the political, ideological, and cultural camps in this country...
...For Al Gore, the answer is not simply money and the support of an interest group within the Democratic party...
...The surprising response came from the chattering classes, who were largely critical of the vice president...
...But the truth is that her show was damaged by her lesbianism—it was her limitation as an actress that she simply was not comfortable or believable playing a single, heterosexual woman...
...This is precisely the message Gore's audience wanted to hear, and the message he wanted to convey...
...Said Juan Williams,"There are lots of people, not just crazy conservatives, who think that maybe women kissing women on TV isn't the greatest thing...
...To be sure, the vice president was pandering...
...As today's liberal sees it, the attitudes of those who believe that there is only one natural "sexual orientation" are usually derived from fear...
...The chattering class's disapproval of Gore's remarks about Ellen has to do with taste: It seems beneath his high office to single out works of mass culture not because of their quality, but because they try to indoctrinate the American people...
...He receives a much more important, if less tangible reward for his words: His gesture makes him feel virtuous, especially by contrast to those who do not share his views...
...She began her career as a standup comic with a particular shtick: Stuttering nervously, stammering humorously, she circled a joke like a dog about to lie down...
...And you would have been hard-pressed to find a single negative word spoken about the idea except by the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council...
...That is why it's hard for a politician to go wrong when he criticizes television for corrupting and lowering us...
...And they have no doubt what to call those who disagree with them: bigots...
...Or at least it didn't until the episode in which Ellen Morgan discovered the true nature of her sexual-ity—and told the woman to whom she was attracted about it by speaking the words "I'm gay" through a loudspeaker at an airport...
...But, to put it bluntly, what's in it for heterosexual supporters of gay rights...
...the show was titled These Friends of Mine when it premiered in 1994, and it was a very self-conscious knock-off of Seinfeld...
...The conventional wisdom around Washington was that the vice president was pandering to Hollywood for campaign dollars and that he wanted to challenge the lingering impression that he and his wife Tipper, whose campaign against explicit lyrics in rock songs infuriated the entertainment industry in the 1980s, were Bab-bitts-with-a-V-chip...
...Jonathan Alter wrote harsh words in Newsweek...
...Over the course of its run, it changed its name, focused more intently on its lead character, dropped the male friend, added different friends, gave Ellen a new profession—and still Ellen just wouldn't spring to life...
...When there is an event on television as highly and as breathlessly publicized as this one (word of Ellen's coming-out surfaced nine months before the episode aired), everybody in America feels almost compelled to tune in and see what is going on...
...The liberal humanist creed is based on the conviction that people who hold liberal humanist ideas are actually a more advanced breed of human than the knuckle-draggers who do not...
...The "Ellen speech" was a landmark moment in American political life—the first such moment for which Al Gore is responsible...
...Gore is right: Millions of Americans were forced to look at sexual orientation in a new light...
...At least when Dan Quayle talked about Murphy Brown, he criticized it...
...Gay rights is a different matter altogether...
...Bigots motivated by irrational fears and angers...
...It is the one issue on which liberals are aggressively, proudly, and triumphantly on the move...
...The other issues dearest to contemporary liberalism—abortion, affirmative action, feminism, environmentalism—are nowhere near as fresh, as biting, as provocative as homosexual rights...
...Ellen shared an apartment with a male friend, palled around with a couple of girl friends, and dated guys...
...Any mention of such ideas is, for them, sophisticated window-dressing for attitudes they find unenlightened at best and genocidal at worst...
...But never before has the ongoing life of a practicing homosexual been the key issue on a prime-time show watched by 10 million people a week...
...to face a serious challenge...
...For once you recognize that the object of your loathing is pretty much like you, hate becomes difficult...
...But there was something unfocused and confused about the show...
...most of us are guilty about the role television plays in our personal and collective lives and think we deserve a little scolding for it every now and then...
...It wasn't even called Ellen to begin with...
...When it comes to these perennials, liberalism's job is to protect the ground it has already won and make sure the conservative counterattack does not prevail...
...It was an open secret in show-business circles that DeGeneres was a lesbian, but she hadn't come out of the closet herself and was, by all accounts, worried that public knowledge of her private sexuality would damage her show and her career...
...Why Al Gore Got in Bed with Ellen By John Podhoretz On October 16, Vice President Al Gore praised the ABC television show Ellen in a speech before entertainment-industry executives in Los Angeles for turning its title character into a lesbian at the end of the sitcom's third season...
...Christian organizations condemned them...
...The entire apparatus of the media celebrity culture—magazines, television news programs, book publishing, newspaper articles—worked together to turn a single episode of a little-discussed and not especially popular sitcom into a major national event...
...It ignites in them the passion essential to any successful ideological under-taking—the sense that they are doing the right thing and that future generations will think of them as admiringly as we think of the abolitionists...
...In the same speech, Gore praised the 1960s miscegenation movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner...
...Gore may not have meant to do it, but by saluting Ellen as he did, and with the words he chose, he exposed an important truth about the cultural attitudes of contemporary liberalism and the Left's agenda...
...Where liberalism is concerned, the opening of American society to homosexuality is the defining issue of the day...
...Time declared Gore a "loser...
...If he can get Hollywood behind him, and if he can line up gay support as well, his challengers will have a harder time of it...
...The only way to break the loop is to change the conventions of American society...
...Now there is a major network television program about a lesbian—about lesbian dating, about lesbian friendships, about how a lesbian behaves around her family...
...There have been gay characters on television before...
...For homosexuals, the liberalization of American attitudes is a matter of the sheerest self-interest...
...It is very difficult to change people's minds when their motivations are irrational...
...The unevolved among us are trapped in a closed loop of doctrine and convention...
Vol. 3 • November 1997 • No. 8
