Ellen Degeneres A Biography
Like many high school graduates, the next natural progression for Ellen after relocating back to Louisiana was to enroll in college and work on obtaining her college degree. Ellen enrolled at the University of New Orleans -- which is often called UNO by local residents -- to major in communications. However, matriculating was not to be in the comedian's future, and she dropped out after only one semester.
At the same time that Ellen was searching for a career, she was holding on to another secret -- a secret about her sexuality that she had yet to tell her parents and one she had only come to accept for herself during this time. The young blonde-haired, blue-eyed Ellen was popular in high school and had a few boyfriends, including Ricky Partain, who even gave Ellen a promise ring but said later in an interview that if she lost the token of his affection, it wasn't worth much.
In her heart, Ellen felt different compared to the other boy-crazy teenaged girls. She was a self-confessed tomboy, and although she liked men, she was never really attracted to them. Thinking she was just a late bloomer and proud of herself for being a virgin, Ellen was still conflicted emotionally because when it came to sexuality, she knew that she was attracted to women. She didn't quite know what to do with these feelings. While she knew she was gay, she didn't feel that she was part of either the gay or straight communities. In two different interviews, Ellen provided an introspective of how she felt at that tender teenage time in her life:
No. I ignored it because I didn't really know what it was until I was 18 years old. I dated guys. I liked guys. But I knew that I liked girls too. I just didn't know what to do with that. I thought, "If I were a guy I'd go out with her." And then I thought, "Well, I don't want to be a guy, really." So I went, "Oh, well," and just went on with my life. My first gay experience was literally someone else's idea -- I was freaked out even by the thought of it. And I thought that was one experience and it was just her, and I started dating guys again, thinking, "Well, I just need to meet the right one." Never could, really.
Ellen accepted her own sexual orientation and began lesbian relationships, but she still needed to share this news with her family. It was important to find the right opportunity to tell them. For her mom, Ellen chose to tell her during a walk on the beach in Pass Christian, Mississippi in 1977, when on a family vacation she finally said the words, "Mom, I'm gay." According to Betty, the then 19-year-old Ellen, who was blossoming into an independent young adult, also told her, "Mom, I'm in love. It's with a woman." Ellen sobbed, but those weren't tears of fear. Ellen was relieved that her news was out in the open. While many gays and lesbians find it difficult to tell their parents about their homosexuality, Ellen admitted in interviews later in her career that she didn't see this as a difficult thing to do. Betty hugged her daughter, but, at the same time, this sympathetic mom felt helpless and scared.
Although Betty supported Ellen, Betty was raised in the 1930s and 1940s, when women were taught to marry and depend on a man for financial and emotional security. Things back then were much different than they were in the 1960s, when Betty was raising Ellen. But as a gay woman, Ellen still had to face a different world -- one that wasn't necessarily accepting of her sexual orientation. In addition, Betty considered herself a stranger to this lifestyle and was still worried about who would take care of her daughter financially, since a man wouldn't be in the picture. In an interview with Diane Sawyer, Betty said that until that very moment on the beach she had not even suspected that Ellen was gay, because of the fact that she had boyfriends in high school. When Sawyer asked Betty if she was horrified that her daughter was gay, Betty replied, "No, I wasn't horrified. Worried. Worried."
Regardless of how Betty might have felt about her daughter's sexual orientation, she would always support her. This is often not the case for many parents who find out that their child is gay, and Betty's support was especially rare for the time period. In the 1950s, consensual gay sex was still considered a felony with possible prison sentences of up to 20 years. In the 1960s, there was a sexual revolution, but the gay community was still shunned and often tormented. In the late 1960s, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual (LGBT) community was repeatedly harassed with multiple raids on gay bars followed by numerous arrests. In June 1969, the New York City gay community fought back for their rights -- literally. After several raids on gay bars in the area over a period of time, New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn gay bar in Greenwich Village and arrested employees and drag performers. However, more than 2,000 lesbian, gay, and transgender supporters resisted arrest, inciting riots and calls for equal gay rights from gay leaders. Gay pride parades and marches were organized in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago and were held yearly after that, including in 1979 when more than 100,000 gays and lesbians marched on Washington. The Stonewall Riots were considered the start of the gay liberation movement.
In the 1970s, although the television industry started to make some strides by adding gay supporting characters or gay story lines to their sitcoms, being gay on a television sitcom was not exactly the same as being gay in real life. Outside of Hollywood, being gay and lesbian was considered a mental health disorder by the psychiatric community, and gays were still fighting for the same basic rights that heterosexuals had -- the right to marry and the right to adopt children.
After the Stonewall Riots, gays and lesbians began to fight for their right to come "out of the closet" and into mainstream America. Organizations were founded on behalf of the gay community to promote equality and acceptance. In 1972, the Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) was founded by Jeanne Manford after she marched with her son, Mortie, in New York City's Gay Pride Parade. Two months earlier, her son was beaten at a gay rights protest while police did nothing.
In 1973, the National Gay Task Force Foundation was founded in New York and worked to change the American Psychiatric Association's classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder. In 1980, the Human Rights Campaign was founded to raise money for congressional candidates who supported fairness to LGBT Americans. In the years that followed, the organization established itself as a resilient force in the overall movement for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender civil rights as it strived to achieve fundamental fairness and equality for all. In 1985, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) was formed in New York to protest the New York Post's grossly defamatory and sensationalized AIDS coverage. Once the organization got underway, its work expanded to Los Angeles, where it educated Hollywood's entertainment industry on the importance of more accurate and realistic portrayals on the screen. There were also gay rights protests and marches, but it didn't mean that homosexuality was more accepted in mainstream American society. Hate crimes were a common occurrence.
However, at Ellen's home, her mother wasn't embarrassed by her daughter. Betty wasn't the type of parent who blamed herself as if Ellen's homosexuality was an error in parenting. Instead, Betty did everything she could to learn about the homosexual lifestyle and how to embrace her daughter for who she was. "In time, I would come to appreciate and admire her for not being like everyone else and for her strength, courage and honesty in being exactly who she was supposed to be," writes Betty in Love, Ellen. In time, Betty would also become an advocate for rights for the gay community.
Ellen's older brother, Vance, who loved his sister and supported her, took the news that his sister was gay in stride, served up with a side dish of humor, a coping tool in the DeGeneres family. Upon hearing the news, Vance joked with Ellen that they probably had even dated the same women at one time. Unfortunately, her father's reaction was not what Ellen had hoped it would be. Elliott kicked Ellen out of the home he then shared with his new wife and stepchildren, concerned that Ellen's lifestyle would influence his stepchildren. However, he did help Ellen to get an apartment and admitted later to Diane Sawyer that kicking her out was a mistake.
For the next few years -- and what seemed like potential fodder for future comedy skits -- Ellen held down many jobs in the New Orleans area. She sold clothes at the Merry-Go-Round chain store at the Lakeside Shopping Center, served food, painted houses, worked at a car wash, bartended, wrapped gifts (this job actually did turn into part of her stand-up comedy routines), sold Hoover vacuums, and shucked oysters. As Ellen says, "When you live in New Orleans, you're bound to be an oyster shucker, aren't ya?"
Similar to her college experience, though, Ellen realized that these various odd jobs were not going to give her a future. The good news was that she finally realized where that future was -- Ellen wanted to make people laugh. Like many aspiring comedians, Ellen knew that she had to start her career by performing in smaller venues and working her way up, so when a friend asked her to perform at a luncheon, she obliged. Ellen gained some exposure and experience and continued to perform at small clubs and coffeehouses in New Orleans as well as college venues.
Unlike other famous stand-up comedians of the time -- such as Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, or Eddie Murphy -- Ellen's material was free of vulgarity and put-downs. There were no discriminatory jokes of any kind. Instead, Ellen took everyday occurrences that she experienced and related them to her audience.
Describing her own brand of humor, she says, "I don't know that I can ever get perspective on who I am to other people. I know who I am and how I feel inside, and I know that it's kind. It's not mean-spirited humor -- it's not a joke at someone else's expense. I've never been interested in that. So I know that it's nice humor, and sometimes it's silly, and sometimes it's smart, but other than that I don't know how to label it." For example, during one of her first gigs, her whole act involved eating a Burger King Whopper and fries. The gist of the skit was how someone would take a bite of food, try to speak, have you wait a minute while they finished, but then take yet another bite. The joke was a hit, and Ellen found herself getting paid to make people laugh, even if it was only a pittance. She knew that she had to write more material, though. "I knew instinctively I couldn't just keep eating onstage," said Ellen in an interview for the New York Times. "Oh, hey, it's that girl who eats on stage. Gee, she's huge!" To keep her material fresh, Ellen regularly wrote new jokes and changed her style along the way, from the use of props in her early standup to the use of stories and words in her later sets.
Life was looking up for the 21-year-old. Her comedy career was on the rise; her mother had accepted her homosexuality, and Ellen was more comfortable in her own skin. At this time, Ellen was also in the throes of a serious relationship with 23-year-old poet Kat Perkoff, who ran a lesbian bar in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Perkoff's sister, Rachel, told People magazine that the two were very creative people who were young, crazy, and very much in love.