Oprah Explores "When
I Knew I Was Gay"
by Christopher Stone,
AfterEaton.com November 21, 2005
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Carson Kressley |
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Billy Porter |
Last Thursday, The
Oprah Winfrey Show aired an episode called "When I Knew I was Gay."
The title intrigues. It sparks speculation: Is Oprah announcing that
Steadman is a beard and Gayle King is more than a gal pal? Is Winfrey
coming out as a lesbian?
No, she’s been there, done that. The "Oprah is gay" rumor ignited in 1997,
fueled by her appearance on Ellen. In June of that year, Oprah
issued a statement: “I am not in the closet. I am not coming out of
the closet. I am not gay.”
"When I Knew I Was Gay" reflects the lives of the episode’s guests.
“Today,” Oprah began, opening the show, “you’re going to meet people hiding the
same secret. “Andrew Friedman says he first knew he was gay back in 1969.
‘My father was watching the evening news. The announcer said that Judy
Garland had died. I fainted. I was nine.’”
Via voice-over, John Kinnally, a Will & Grace Executive Producer, says he
first knew he was gay at 8 when he became obsessed with the man on the Doan’s
Back Pain Pills box. He was a rugged, muscled guy, showing some
vulnerability.
Through Kate Nielsen’s voice-over, we learn that she first knew at five, when
she fell in love with beautiful Julie Andrews while watching The Sound of
Music.
The episode's first half was played largely for easy, obvious laughs by
Oprah’s in-studio guests: There was Queer Eye’s Carson Kressley,
Billy Porter, a singer-writer-author, and Robert Trachtenberg, whose book
When I Knew (Regan Books), inspired the episode.
In addition to studio guests, the show was peppered with short, filmed
interviews featuring gay men and lesbian women recalling when they first knew.
Other filmed segments featured gay teens talking about coming out in the 21st
Century.
“I told her about two weeks before the show (Queer Eye) came out,”
Kressley revealed about coming out to his mother. But Carson remembers
knowing at 4, when his friends were into Farrah Fawcett, and he fancied Lee
Majors.
The show took an insightful turn after Winfrey introduced Alan Downs, author of
The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing up Gay in a Straight
Man’s World (Da Capo Lifelong Books). For Oprah, Downs defined velvet
rage as “the anger that develops inside when you have something inside yourself
that you have to hide: a core secret.”
Downs knew his sexual orientation from a very early age, but he didn’t want to
believe it. “I came from a very religious family,” he told Winfrey.
“I thought if I met the right woman, and I married her, I would change.”
He met and married the right woman. He had sex with her. He didn’t
change. Sex with his wife became a “chore.”
After their divorce, Alan told his wife that he had probably always been gay.
“She was horrified and angry,” he says. For him, marrying was not an act
of deception. “It was an attempt to convince myself that I was straight.
My ex wife was my best friend and I confused things by believing, ‘This is going
to make me straight.’”
Billy Porter, who came out to his Pentecostal Minister mother three
times, told Oprah, “Men are promiscuous, and in heterosexual relationships,
women stop their promiscuity.”
Downs noted, “Promiscuity is not unique to gay men.” He believes that
shame, to a large extent, powers gay promiscuity. “The shame is a sense of
knowing that there’s something about you that’s unacceptable -– that’s not okay.
And so, we go to other men to try to make ourselves feel better about
ourselves.”
The episode’s meat and potatoes were finally served at the top of the
second half when Oprah welcomed Kim, Amanda, and Amanda’s lesbian lover, Kristie
Jo. Whereas the scents of frivolity and self-promotion permeated the first
half, the second half had an authentic aroma. There was deep meaning,
heft. It seemed a different show.
Kim and Amanda are a mother and daughter working to rebuild their relationship,
shattered when Mom walked in on her daughter with Kristie Jo. Unlike the
men, the women had no TV series, books, or CDs to tout. Their appearance
was simply a part of Kim, Amanda, and Kristie Jo’s healing.
In truth, Kim shouldn’t have been surprised to discover Amanda’s lesbianism.
When the child was ten, at the dinner table, she told Kim that she thought she
was gay. “I almost choked on my dinner!” Kim recalls. She found her
daughter’s self-outing implausible, telling herself that Amanda was too young to
know. When asked for input, Kim’s gay friends told her what she wanted to
hear, “She’s too young to know.” But Amanda did know.
Nonetheless, Kim packed away concerns about the ten-year-old’s sexual
orientation along with the Tin Man costume Amanda wore on Halloween.
Flash forward seven years. Amanda is seventeen. Healthy and
beautiful, she’s excelled as a student, an athlete, and a debutante. One
night, Kim walks into her daughter’s room and finds her with Kristie Jo.
“It was like walking into a nightmare!” Kim remembers. “I was irate.
I was hysterical. My dreams for Amanda died. My whole life flipped
upside down.”
Later in the program, when Kim advises gay teens, “Tell your parents. I
didn’t have the opportunity to behave in a dignified manner,” Oprah chides Kim,
reminding her, “You really can’t do better than a 10-year-old having the courage
to tell you.” Even today, Kim refutes being in denial about Amanda’s
youthful revelation.
For her part, Amanda remembers the night Kim discovered her with Kristie
Jo as “the most horrible of my entire life. My mother said that I was
going to hell. I felt as though she had ripped the soul out of my body.”
Kim blamed the older Kristie Jo, a 21-year-old musician, whom Amanda loves and
admires. She forbade her daughter to see her. Kim threatened a
restraining order. Amanda went to live with her grandmother. At that
point, Amanda says, “I hated my mother with every ounce of my being. I had
constant thoughts of killing myself. That would be the ultimate, ‘See what
you’ve done to me, Mom?’”
At the time, Kim also threatened to out Kristie Jo to her parents. In a
preemptive strike, Kristie Jo called an emergency meeting with her family.
She describes their reaction to her disclosure as “quiet….shocked, but
supportive.”
Amanda’s girlfriend doesn’t identify as gay. She’s had boyfriends, but no
previous crushes on women, and she’s probably bisexual.
“Is this an Anne Heche thing?” Oprah asks, referencing Ellen DeGeneres’ former
spouse, now in a heterosexual marriage. “I don’t think so,” Kristie Jo
responds without hesitation. But she doesn’t really know. Right now,
the only thing about which she is certain is her love for Amanda.
Encouraged by therapists and motherly love, Kim has somewhat accepted Amanda’s
lesbianism, but she still comes across as making this issue more about herself
than about her daughter. Kim says she to want to move forward with her and
Amanda’s relationship, and Amanda believes her. Amanda, now 18, is a woman
who wants to be loved and valued for who she is.
Any of today’s major talk show hosts could have navigated the frothy,
male first half of "When I Knew I Was Gay". Oprah is one of the few
capable of mining successfully the golden second half. Perhaps that is
why, after twenty years, hers is still a welcome presence.
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