Remember When Ellen DeGeneres Came Out on Prime Time TV?

It’s hard to recall how rapidly society changes sometimes when there’s always so much going on. But once upon a time, there were no lead gay actors on television. It wasn’t something that networks and advertisers would usually support until one particular woman changed it all. Remember when Ellen DeGeneres came out on prime time TV?

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It was April of 1997 and it was a moment that would go down in history and it changed the world forever. Both Ellen DeGeneres and her character, Ellen Morgan, would come out as gay within weeks of each other. It had to happen. After all, the fictional character Ellen Morgan had zero chemistry with men throughout the show’s then 4-year-run. But mostly, Ellen DeGeneres was tired of hiding.

Ellen DeGeneres No Longer Wanted to Live a Lie

Ellen would later tell People that for her, it was about her conscience.

“What I did, I want to say it was brave, because it was, but it was mainly for me,” she said. No human being should live with a lie or a secret that they feel bad or shame about.”

Ellen told Oprah, who actually made an appearance in the coming-out episode as Ellen’s therapist, that she couldn’t keep pretending to be someone she wasn’t. Her mindset switched from thinking that who she was, was no one’s business, to feeling that she was hiding something.

“Then I realized that as long as I had this secret that I worried about all the time that it made it look like something was wrong,” Ellen said. That was actually in front of a live audience and filmed prior to the coming-out episode but withheld from airing until after the TV show made the announcement.

The Coming-Out Episode Needed to Be Approved First

It made sense that Ellen needed to come out of the closet, but how? This was a stick situation, and it was bound to ruffle a lot of feathers. Most importantly, Ellen needed to convince the powers-that-be, aka Walt Disney Studios and ABC Network, that this was something they could pull off.

The New York Post quotes the show’s writer, Dava Savel, reminiscing about Ellen’s mission to make the big request to Walt Disney.

“It really was her fight and on her to present her case,” Savel said. “We had to walk to corporate offices with Mark [Driscoll, co-executive producer]. It was like the Bataan Death March.”

Although many who worked with Ellen weren’t surprised that she was gay, and in fact there were probably many viewers who speculated as well, it was never actually made clear. After all, Ellen Morgan’s potential love interests were always men.

As it happened, Ellen and the show’s writers were successful in convincing the networks to let her come out. It would be the world’s first prime-time sitcom to feature a leading gay actor.

“The Puppy Episode” Was Code to Prevent Leaks

The episode, titled “The Puppy Episode,” aired on April 30, 1997. The name was chosen for two reasons. Firstly, it served as a red herring — to throw off anyone who might leak the plot. Secondly, as Ellen later explained on her talk show in 2017, “The writers told the executives that they wanted me to come out, because my character needed to be in a relationship after four years of not being in a relationship. Someone at the studio said, ‘Well, get her a puppy; she’s not coming out.’”

Ellen DeGeneres timed her own coming-out announcement with the TV show. On April 14, 1997, Time magazine featured her in its cover story. The front page was captioned “Yep, I’m Gay.” Of course, “The Puppy Episode” had already been filmed and was set to air two weeks later.

In “The Puppy Episode,” Ellen Morgan goes out to dinner with a television reporter named Richard. He’s on an assignment in LA and accompanied by his producer, Susan. Susan joins Ellen and Richard for dessert and the two women hit it off. Ellen ends up falling in love with Susan.

When Ellen hears Susan and Richard are about to leave early, she rushes to the airport to confess her feelings to Susan. The scene features a flustered Ellen, who is struggling to find the words. The script actually didn’t even have the words for Ellen, as the writers wanted the actress to figure it out herself. Because this was such a big and important moment, a moment that would surely rock the world, it needed to be natural.

Ellen keeps trying to say it and then accidentally turns on an airport terminal speaker as she says the words. “Susan, I’m gay,” she finally blurts out, and everyone in the waiting area looks up in shock.

Ellen Lost Numerous Sponsors, Received Threats

The two-part, hour-long “Puppy Episode” garnered 44 million viewers on its debut and would later receive an Emmy and a Peabody Award. It also led to death threats and studio bomb threats, according to a Page Six interview with Ellen in 2017. Sponsors such as Chrysler, Johnson & Johnson, General Motors, JCPenney, Domino’s Pizza, and McDonalds withdrew their ads from the show’s time slots.

ABC felt the heat as well. It declined ad offers from The Human Rights Campaign and a lesbian-centered cruise line known as Olivia Cruises and Resorts. A Birmingham, Alabama ABC affiliate refused to air “The Puppy Episode” at all. The network used a parental advisory warning on a later episode featuring a same-sex kiss. And eventually, ratings fell, and the show was cancelled in 1998. Biography quotes the ABC president at the time attributing the failing ratings to the show becoming “a program about a lead character who was gay every single week.”

In the End, Ellen Made LGBTQ History

But Ellen would forever go down in history as one of the most influential figures in promoting LGBTQ rights. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded her the Medal of Freedom. He choked up when he gave his remarks:

It’s easy to forget now, when we’ve come so far, where now marriage is equal under the law — just how much courage was required for Ellen to come out on the most public of stages almost 20 years ago.  Just how important it was not just to the LGBT community, but for all of us to see somebody so full of kindness and light, somebody we liked so much, somebody who could be our neighbor or our colleague or our sister challenge our own assumptions, remind us that we have more in common than we realize, push our country in the direction of justice.

What an incredible burden that was to bear.  To risk your career like that.  People don’t do that very often.  And then to have the hopes of millions on your shoulders.  But it’s like Ellen says:  We all want a tortilla chip that can support the weight of guacamole.  Which really makes no sense to me, but I thought would brighten the mood, because I was getting kind of choked up.  (Laughter.)  And she did pay a price — we don’t remember this.  I hadn’t remembered it.  She did, for a pretty long stretch of time — even in Hollywood. 

And yet, today, every day, in every way, Ellen counters what too often divides us with the countless things that bind us together — inspires us to be better, one joke, one dance at a time.

President Barack Obama

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