Badpuppy Gay Today

Wednesday, 30 April 1997

"What's happening on Ellen is important in several ways," says Professor Larry Gross, author of Out of the Mainstream: Sexual Minorities and the Mass Media, because "from the cover of Time magazine to all the other people now writing and talking about images of gays, much attention is being paid to the issue by people who otherwise might not pay any attention at all."

Some who have paid close attention are advertisers who, says The Hollywood Reporter, have invested nearly four times over the going ad rate--up to $400 thousand-- to get spots on one of history's more controversial TV sit-com episodes, one which the network believes will capture "mega ratings," or at least 30% of TV+ America.

ABC has not yet committed to a return of Ellen next season nor will it tell in advance who's advertising on tonight's episode, fearing advertisers will be harassed by the Baptist political crusader, Jerry Falwell and other well-organized and obedient "follower-types" much given to fundamentalist and evangelical meddling.

Gay men and lesbians will be watching Ellen tonight, in part, to see just who is willing to advertise and who is not. Major companies that have refused are Wendy's fast-food chain, Chrysler Corporation, General Motors, and Johnson & Johnson.

Only one American ABC affiliate, in Birmingham, Alabama, has pulled the plug on this evening's episode though the majority opposing Ellen in a state that's "conservative" about homosexuality is a slim one, according to Roy Hoffman in the Mobile Press-Register.

Gay and lesbian Alabamans, have, since the affiliate blackout was announced, planned to see the historic program at the same time as the rest of the nation with a satellite-auditorium showing in Birmingham. (See Archives "Alabama ABC-TV Affiliate to Censor Ellen,") This single act of united self-affirmation has sparked, says Cathy Renna, a visiting GLAAD official, an "overwhelmingly positive" response on the part of Alabama's gay communities, a passionate outpouring that has so impressed her, she says, "that it has touched me in ways that even the big marches I've been to don't." What is happening in Alabama because of Ellen, she believes, is now laying a foundation for personal and social liberation in that state like nothing else has.

To appreciate the distance traveled by ABC from a 1972 Marcus Welby, MD program to Ellen on ABC today, is to know that only 25 years ago the "good" Dr. Welby, played by Robert Young, dispensed advice to a married but "homosexually diagnosed man" who was complaining of "sick (same-sex) urges". Welby advised his patient, "You can still be a good husband and father as long as these feelings are surpressed."

This attitude, according to Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawik, was par for the course in the way television treated homosexuality in that time. A second 1972 Welby episode was titled " The Outrage," and "revolved around a gay teacher molesting a teen-age student, equating homosexuality with pedophilia."

With tonight's episode of Ellen, same-sex feelings "suppressed" and accusations of "pedophilia" technically become de classe in discussions of homosexuality on the American Broadcasting Corporation. A corner will, no doubt, be turned in U.S. media history because Ellen represents the first lead lesbian or gay character ever introduced on a mainstream TV network series.

Hating this fact, The Reverend Jerry Falwell indicates that his organizing of opposition to Ellen will continue to mount. Falwell will fully utilize, he seems to threaten, his pious, censoring Baptist demagoguery, issuing another blitz of self-righteous ultimatums to advertisers in his familiar used-car-salesman tones.

But if expected opposition to Ellen exists, there is a different kind opposition that may surprise even Falwell. Robert Bray, a San Francisco resident and former media director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, says that the real Ellen, not surprisingly, is a mainstreamer and that he's going to throw an Allen Ginsberg party himself. "I'm planning a house party," he editorializes, "featuring readings of the late Allen Ginsberg's HOWL. Now there's an Allen event I can get behind. Consider it a counter-Ellen party." Bill Hayes, also writing from the San Francisco Bay area in Salon Magazine, says that he considers the Ellen episode "a lesbian debut commodified."

"These two big city writers," replies Patrick Gardner, a central Floridian, "must be living in an ivory tower because they can't realize what an event like this means to everyday people in thousands of little, out-of-the-way towns. We small-towners don't understand much of anything about commercialization. If we did we wouldn't celebrate Christmas either. Hey, we just want to see a gay lead on TV."