"You think I'm giving off some sort of gay vibe?"
On April 30, this and many other questions were posed and answered by character Ellen Morgan in a hilarious one-hour special episode of ABC's "Ellen."
In the episode we had all been waiting for, fans of "Ellen" were treated to an hour of celebrity guest stars, a comic extravaganza and Ellen's monumental and "loud" announcement that she is gay.
As Ellen's therapist (played by Oprah Winfrey) noted after Ellen had a meaningful dream: "Ellen, if you keep this to yourself, you're just going to continue having these dreams. And then it's going to start showing up in your waking life as these little clues that get more and more obvious and eventually tiresome."
This quote whimsically referred to the past season of "Ellen," where each episode contained various innuendoes about Ellen's sexual orientation and audiences eagerly awaited the big announcement.
When the telling episode finally aired, it was done impressively, with poise, integrity and a great deal of humor. Director Gil Junger and writers Mark Driscoll, Dava Savel, Tracy Newman and Jonathan Stark cleverly focused on comedy in order to avoid the episode coming off as "heavy" or sermon-like. The episode treated the subject lightly and non-patronizingly, in a manner appropriate for a sitcom, and it addressed realistic issues without being dismissive.
One prime example of this is the exchange between Ellen and her therapist after she realizes that she's gay. Ellen described her vision of a normal life as the "same thing everybody wants. I want a house with a picket fence. A dog, a cat, Sunday barbeques, someone to love, someone who loves me, someone I can build a life with. I just want to be happy."
The therapist asked, "And you think you can't have these things with a woman?"
Ellen answered, "Well, society has a pretty big problem with it, you know? There are a lot of people out there who think people like me are sick ... oh God, why did I ever rent "Personal Best?"
Responded Oprah's character, "You can't blame this on the media, Ellen."
The episode began with guest star Laura Dern ("Jurassic Park"), whose character Susan causes Ellen to reassess her sexuality. Ellen undergoes heavy denial (she declares to a man, "I guess I'm just a sucker for man-woman sex") before accidentally broadcasting to Susan and a crowded airport terminal over the P.A. system that she's gay. Rounding out the episode, Ellen awkwardly tells her closest friends her sexual orientation in a funny and buoyant scene.
Other guest stars included k.d. lang, Dwight Yoakam, Billy Bob Thornton as a grocery store clerk, and Melissa Etheridge, who presented Susan with a toaster oven for "recruiting" another lesbian.
Though television has its share of gay characters, from Ross' lesbian ex-wife on "Friends" to Doug Savant's character on "Melrose Place," Ellen Morgan is the first leading character in television history to come out of the closet. The ratings for the April 30 episode of "Ellen" were as high as expected, but the overall ramifications of Ellen's declaration remain to be seen.
For Ellen DeGeneres, the comedian/actress who plays Ellen Morgan, the episode contained many occurrences which resembled her real-life experience of coming out of the closet. She stated in an interview with ABC's "PrimeTime Live" that she feels lucky that her family has accepted her sexual orientation, though acceptance did not come without some painful incidents.
According to "PrimeTime Live," a government statistic states that a gay teen-ager is about three times as likely to attempt suicide as another teen-ager. DeGeneres said that whatever happens to her, the coming-out episode was, in part, to make an appeal to those teens to hold on.
Despite the publicity blitz surrounding Ellen Morgan's announcement, life will go on normally for DeGeneres and her real-life partner, actress Anne Heche.
And what will television's first leading lesbian character do now?
As Ellen Morgan joked to her therapist, "I'm going to Disneyland!"
Ellen (Ellen DeGeneres, left) revealed her sexual orientation in the April 30 episode of "Ellen," which also starred Laura Dern.