Why Ellen DeGeneres’s Coming Out Was Miraculous

One of my earliest memories concerning homosexuality happened on a Sunday morning soon after Ellen DeGeneres came out. I was visiting my grandmother’s house, we’d just come back from church (yes, we were Christian southerners, but Democrats and Episcopalians), and I took a break from playing with my cousins to listen to the adults’ conversation. They were discussing the week’s big news, which could be best encapsulated by Ellen’s three-word bombshell on the cover of Time Magazine, released 20 years ago today: “Yep, I’m gay.”

The simultaneous coming-out of Ellen DeGeneres, America’s goofy kid sister, and Ellen Morgan, the character she played on her wildly popular sitcom Ellen, was a historic moment for the LGBTQ community—a mainstream celebrity was walking out of the closet of her own free will, and the title character of a hit TV show was going to take America along for the ride. But it was quickly overwhelmed by the backlash. Advertisers pulled from her show, Christian groups boycotted ABC (and Disney, its parent company), and Jerry Falwell famously referred to her as “Ellen DeGenerate.” Despite the crop of gay TV characters who began to appear after she came out (Will and Grace premiered the following year), Ellen itself lasted only one more season, several episodes of which were prefaced with a parental advisory warning. Ellen’s coming out was a test case for public acceptance of homosexuality, and in 1997, it certainly seemed to have failed.

Ellen had counted on a level of tolerance that did not then exist, and on that Sunday, it seemed certain she would pay for it with her career. The memory I have is of hanging on my dad’s waist and hearing one of my aunts say “Well, what did she expect?” to the general assent of all the grown-ups. It wasn’t hateful; no one accused her of being unnatural or disgusting, merely suicidally naive.

I was nine years old, and a decade away from the blinding realization that yep, I’m gay too. But like a lot of childhood memories that touch even glancingly on the subject of homosexuality, I remember it with near-perfect clarity. Some part of me was paying close attention, and it unquestioningly absorbed the lesson of that day: if you are gay, keep it to yourself or suffer the consequences.

In the twenty years since then, a miracle has occurred: America changed its mind. In 1996, only 27 percent of Americans believed gay marriage should be legal. In 2016, it was 61 percent. (Granted, that’s far from the only metric of tolerance, but it’s still a valuable benchmark.) Neil Patrick Harris—another affable blond, likely Ellen’s closest male equivalent—spent years playing a womanizing straight man on How I Met Your Mother while living openly as a devoted gay father and husband. Weeks ago, Kristen Stewart, a bona fide A-lister, formally announced that she was “so gay” on national television—and the biggest story the next day was Melissa McCarthy’s Sean Spicer impersonation. That kind of tolerance could have taken generations, but instead it bounded forward on the backs of the queer people who were brave enough to come out, even back when a positive reception was far from assured. Thanks to them, we now live in the world imagined by Ellen, predicted by Ellen, in no small part created by Ellen.

The story of Ellen DeGeneres is the story of great social change that happened in the hearts of millions of individual families, including mine. Ten years after Ellen came out to the world, I set down the same path and came out to myself (I might have done it sooner, but I had this funny idea that there would be consequences). Once I cleared that hurdle, it never really occurred to me to stay closeted to anyone else. By 2009, The L Word was a hit, Ellen herself had returned to the airwaves, and I felt I could count on a level of acceptance from both society and my family. But like Ellen, I was disappointed in that hope.

When I broke the news to my family, they went through the familiar stages of processing—denial, “you’re just being trendy,” anger—but the one I remember best was the oft-repeated admonition not to tell anyone. “Do you really have to broadcast it?” my dad asked me more than once. They weren’t being hateful; they were just afraid that if I became publicly attached to this identity, I would suffer the consequences. (And really, what else could I expect?)

But that was ten years ago, and far from moving past my lesbianism, I turned pro. I spent several years writing for a website called AfterEllen, one of the most authoritative advocates for more and better cultural representation of queer women while it existed. I made a career out of pushing for this kind of representation because I’d seen what it could do firsthand. And like so many parents, mine eventually came around. In time, they caught up with the positive feedback loop of such representation—an entertainment and media industry that imagined a more tolerant world into existence, one that invited queer people into America’s living rooms and brought us to where we are now: finally, miraculously, commonplace. My mother, who once angrily said that she “would never pay for a wedding between two women,” is now positively chomping at the bit for my girlfriend and I to walk down the aisle.

Ellen herself is America’s sweetheart once again. Her relentlessly upbeat talk show is consistently among the highest rated shows on daytime TV, she is the magnate of her own lifestyle brand (which just launched its pet accessory line), and her marriage to Portia de Rossi is subject to the same mix of tabloid adulation and speculation as every straight celebrity couple. And it only took twenty years.

Like all miracles, Ellen’s redemption did not offer a panacea for homophobia so much as a glimpse of what’s possible. By all means, people are still suffering for coming out, the legislative and cultural gains made by the queer movement have not been evenly felt across all demographics, and the bigots haven’t just packed up their placards and gone home. Ellen’s triumph was inarguably dependent on the fact that she is white, thin, and (“degenerate” wordplay aside) profoundly unobjectionable.

But in April 2017, when the present political landscape makes it easy to be cynical about human nature, and those gains in tolerance we do see are mired in a horrific backlash, I find it inexpressibly comforting to remember that morning, a mere twenty years ago, when Ellen DeGeneres seemed to have made herself into a rather pointless martyr. Look at her now, tap dancing back to life.