One of America’s best-known TV moms comes out of the closet as a real-life lesbian.
Since her TV career heyday in the 1970s and ’80s as a darling of the popular prime-time series Family and Family Ties, Meredith Baxter has mainly flown under the radar, with the exception of a few acclaimed turns in made-for-TV movies such as My Breast and A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story. That is until she boarded the Sweet Caribbean Cruise with thousands of other lesbians last month. If the woman who famously played Elyse Keaton, liberal mother to Michael J. Fox’s conservative Alex on the long-running sitcom Family Ties, thought she would go unnoticed amid generations of gay women who idolized her for her blond-haired, blue-eyed, all-American good looks, she was wrong.
When the 62-year-old actress realized that she and her partner of four years, Nancy Locke, a 54-year-old contractor, were making a splash on the lesbian cruise, Baxter decided to take control of the story she knew would follow when she came back to shore — and come out publicly. True to form for Baxter, who has been sober for 19 years and has spoken at engagements across the country about her battle with alcoholism, the Emmy Award-nominated actress wanted to make sure there were no skeletons in her closet.
The cruise, which Baxter was on primarily in order to shoot a guest stint on the lesbian-themed Web series We Have to Stop Now, wasn’t the first lesbian event she’s attended since coming out to herself and her family seven years ago. Last April the three-times-married mother of five went virtually unnoticed when she attended the Dinah, the annual four-day lesbian extravaganza in Palm Springs, Calif.
In her first interview with the gay press, which she says can be called nothing other than a “coming-out” interview, Baxter discusses the attention she received from women on the cruise, the impact sobriety may have had on her coming-out, and the cakewalk of telling family and friends she’s gay.
The Advocate: Let’s get right to it. What has brought you to this point, where you’re coming out publicly?
Meredith Baxter: Well, to be honest, it was time. And promoted probably from the attention brought from having been on the cruise, I knew that something was coming from that. So I thought, Let me just beat them to it and tell it in my words instead of someone’s made-up words.
You were also at the Dinah last April, correct? Nothing seemed to come of that. Have you been hiding in plain sight this whole time?
Yes, I have. You know, I did reach a point where I thought, Am I invisible? But it was fine because we had friends at the Dinah who kind of paved the way for us and let us slide in. And my goal was to stay under the radar. I wasn’t prepared for anything at the time. And also, I know that I was flirting with the possibility, which was OK, ’cause it wasn’t going to last forever, and I didn’t really want it to. I’m a slow learner. It just took me a while.
When did you realize you were gay?
Thirteen years ago I had a short-term affair with somebody — a woman — who I just cared for tremendously as a person, [I] was not really attracted to her, but the best way to describe it, [a romance] seemed like the next natural step in our relationship just because I cared about her a lot. Not once — it’s probably hard to imagine — but not once did it occur to me that I was a lesbian. Not once. I just thought, OK, I don’t think so, and went off and got married again for a short period of time. And a couple years after that, I entered my next foray into being with a woman, and the penny dropped at that point.
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