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3/97

Most likely a lot of you politically correct types haven't tuned into TV sitcomland since "MASH," but, if you still have a TV with network reception, take a gander at a show called "Ellen."

It's the first weekly TV show with an openly gay or lesbian star, playing - a lesbian.

The first time I saw the show in its opening season it seemed pretty inept, with a leading lady, Ellen DeGeneres, who was obviously queer, playing a silly, undefined sort of woman who got into marginally funny situations.

"'Gilligan's Island' for the 90's," I thought. "This will never last." But a funny thing started happening. DeGeneres, as the character Ellen, began making comments that could only be interpreted as references to herself as - a lesbian.

My ears perked up. Maybe this wasn't just another feeble attempt to wrench comedy out of the make-believe foibles of a castful of cute and cuddly young singles. The show got sharper and funnier as it began to focus on the very real struggles of a woman trying to come to terms with who she is.

Soon the character Ellen began to look very much like a woman in the throes of coming out. She started to see a therapist to deal with a rash of problems that were getting in the way of her being her authentic self - her dependence on her parents, her insecurities, her fear of not being like everybody else. She sold her business and bought a house. She wasn't waiting any longer for marriage to turn her into a real adult.

One defining moment occurred when the real estate agent showing her prospective homes presented a puppet show with a male and female puppet, superimposed against slides of homes for sale.

"And here comes your husband home from work," said the real estate agent.

"I think he's at the wrong house," replied Ellen.

At the start of the show's second season it became official. Word spread through TV land that Ellen was coming out. Now, each new episode brings DeGeneres's character closer to the inevitable moment of truth. The show's writers have even set a date for the event, April 30.

There are many things that make Ellen more interesting than previous incarnations of the TV lesbian. She is single, unlike the lesbian couples in "Mad About You" and "Friends." She is butch of center and makes a point of never wearing dresses or other feminine accoutrement. There is no attempt to make her seem like she is just like everybody else in every way but her sexuality.

And, she is the star, the lead, the main focus of the show. Because of this, Ellen is the first gay or lesbian characters in a TV series who is actually portrayed from a gay perspective

A particular scene in a recent episode stands out in my mind. The show was about Ellen mistakenly thinking that a deaf man has a crush on her, when he was really interested in another character named Audrey.

Ellen was flattered, confused and rendered uncomfortable by what she believed was male attention. Eventually the matter was resolved when the man revealed that he was actually attracted to Audrey.

At the end of the show Ellen, both relieved and embarrassed, was leaving a performance of the National Theater of the Deaf with a gay male buddy.

To deflect his attention from her embarrassing situation she said to him, "Oh, look, there's a cute guy."

And Peter, her friend, replied, "Ooh, where?"

The whole scene took about 30 seconds, just some typical banter, a lesbian teasing a gay man in a time-honored and every day kind of way. It was just a throw-away scene easily forgotten by most viewers.

But, wow! It was so real, so honest, so gay-from-a gay-point-of-view, maybe for the first time ever on an American TV program.

I didn't even think about it until after the show was over, it just seemed normal to me. And then I realized - THAT JUST SEEMED NORMAL TO ME! Since I have never before, to my memory, seen anything on TV that resembled life as I know it as a lesbian, I believe those 30 seconds represented a milestone.

If you think that my enthusiasm for this TV heroine is "much ado about nothing," that only brain-dead idiots would waste their precious moments allowing TV waves to invade their nervous systems, consider this: more people watch a single episode of "Ellen" than will ever read all of my Free Press columns, and many of those viewers are young people who are deeply influenced by popular culture.

So it's an important step forward when the number one purveyor of mass culture, television, serves up an endearing and richly complex lesbian character for prime time viewers. It helps to erase the barriers that set gay and lesbian people apart as "other."

Because the sad truth is that, even in relatively liberal west Sonoma County, one of the most popular putdowns on the school playgrounds is "gay." And it's not just used to describe a person who appears to be gay or lesbian, it's also used synonymously with words like dumb or weird, such as "That shirt is so gay."

Now, into this inherently homophobic atmosphere insert one lovable, funny and incorrigibly human lesbian TV character. As my mother says, "it couldn't hurt." Are you interested in what others think about this "Ellen business?" (That's how my local librarian dismissed the topic when my daughter and I went to the library to research it.) GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, maintains an "Ellen Watch" on its website. The address is http://www.glaad.org.