It was an
archetypal People celebrity wedding featuring two of
the beautiful people, one in pants and the other in a
gown, and a dreamy setting with flowers, champagne,
candlelight, the whole romantic nine yards. No expense
spared, no fabulous purveyor left unmentioned.
(Mark's Garden! Zac Posen! Neil Lane!) The only
thing missing: a groom.
But People
hardly noticed.
And that's
what was most amazing about the August 16 marriage of Ellen
DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi: People and other
mainstream celebrity news sources didn't treat
the event much differently than they would, say, the
arrival of Brangelina's next children. CNN.com did
headline the word "marry" in scare quotes, but
the blogosphere outcry forced the site to make a quick
edit. Other than that there seemed to be no backlash
from the mainstream media or public.
What was once
California dreaming has turned into a Golden State reality,
and leading the way down the aisle -- as she has, so to
speak, for the past decade of gay progress -- is
DeGeneres.
She wasn't
the first celesbian (k.d. lang, Melissa Etheridge, and
Chastity Bono were public about their sexual orientation
before she was), but Ellen's coming-out was
certainly the most heralded. Who can forget the cover
of Time magazine in 1997 with the headline
"Yep, I'm gay"? The very
acknowledgment of that fact was news and even warranted a
full hour on Oprah. DeGeneres then turned her
eponymous TV show character into a lesbian, coming out
by sharing a kiss with guest star Laura Dern. And
offscreen she began unabashedly parading her relationship
with actor Anne Heche up and down red carpets.
The result: The
religious right was in an uproar; people picketed ABC,
which distributed Ellen; and in '98 the
network canceled the show. DeGeneres couldn't
find work, and even Dern would later go on to say that
she couldn't get another job for at least a year
after her guest spot. Ellen and Ellen were dead
in the water.
It was another
two years before Vermont legalized civil unions, and four
more before Massachusetts instituted marriage equality. By
then DeGeneres had embarked on the next phase of her
career, as a daytime talk-show host, and was welcomed
into the homes of millions of Americans as an openly
gay woman.
By the time
California made it legal for her to marry De Rossi, her
partner of four years, DeGeneres had become one of those
people who transcends common notions about gender or
sexuality, much as a Bill Cosby or Tiger Woods seems
to rise above common racial prejudices. She's so
damn friendly, cute, funny -- dare we say normal? --
that the everyday Americans have seamlessly
incorporated -- and accepted -- her sexual orientation
as a part of who she is. No questions asked.
DeGeneres's studio audience gave her a standing
ovation when she announced her engagement, and a
Harris poll this year found that DeGeneres is
currently the country's "favorite television
star."
What a difference
a decade has made -- both for DeGeneres and for
mainstream Americans' attitudes toward gay men and
lesbians. In fact, you can almost gauge the
public's feelings about LGBT people through its
treatment of Ellen. When just coming out was the bravest
thing a person could do, DeGeneres became the face of
gay people's struggle to be open. Now
she's become the face of the struggle for equality,
and her marriage represents just how far we've
come.