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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (April 18, 1997)
just out ▼ april 18. 1997 ▼ 21 Continued from page 19 while unfair, is not against the law—a fact one of the colleagues is shocked to learn. The spot offers a phone number for the Human Rights Campaign which viewers can call to get more information. (Funding for the ad was made possible by a $225,000 donation from Jessica Stevens, the les bian CEO of a California high-tech company.) With 65 ABC affiliates willing to air the spot, HRC currently plans to place it in 33 markets across the country. According to HRC, the ad has been rejected by affiliates in Chicago, New York, Houston and, closer to home, Eugene, as well as a handful of other stations. The spot has been accepted by, among others, the Portland affiliate—as well as the relatively rural enclave of Fargo, N.D. According to Red Wing, news conferences in most of the cities where the ad has been placed— as well as in most of those declining to run it—are set for April 22 to publicly unveil spot. HRC isn’t the only potential ad vertiser stung by ABC. The net work also rejected Olivia Cruise Lines’ request to buy air time, stating its ad was unfit for younger viewers. Though shooting of the ad had not yet begun, plans called for the commercial to show two women kissing aboard a cruise ship. Some have called ABC’s decision to reject the ad “a double standard,” consider ing that the network is will- i ng to broadcast a show about a lesbian discovering herself. “ W e’re bew ildered,” GLAAD national communi cations director Alan Klein tells Just Out. “It’s hard to speculate about what’s go ing on in their heads.” The show’s Friends OuT v/»TV\ tEtteo “As more gay- and lesbian-themed program ming begins to air, network executives will have to take another look at their advertising policies,” adds NGLTF’s Lobel. ‘They don’t seem to have a problem running an ad for other cruise lines with happy straight couples kissing and being romantic. Aren’t there children watching those programs, too? HRC spokesman Davis Smith says ABC’s rejection of Olivia’s request “calls into serious question the reason ABC gave the Human Rights Campaign for rejecting our commercial. “We had thought our ad was being treated like all other ‘issue’ advertising. Now we have reason to believe otherwise,” he says. ABC’s decisions not with standing, much of the me dia coverage surrounding Ellen has been nonjudgmental, if not favorable. Note this ques tion presented by the ever-gay-friendly New York Times columnist Frank Rich in the paper of record’s April 10 issue: “Am I the only parent who feels that the straight cruise ship commercials starring Kathie Lee Gifford are more of a threat to my kids’ view of heterosexuality than anything a gay sponsor could come up with?” In that piece, Rich also highlights how far culture has come bv recounting the story of Sheila James Kuehl, “a popu lar sitcom actress of the early ’ 6 0 s, fondly remembered as Zelda Gilroy, the smart but plain coed unrequitedly in love with the hero of The Many Loves o f Dobie Gillis." He writes: “Speaking this week from Califor nia, where she is now Speaker Pro tern of the state Assembly, Ms. Kuehl recalled how, as a closeted lesbian in her early 20s, she’d been up for her own spin-off series as Dobie Gillis concluded its run. “ ‘People were high on it,’ she said. ‘We thought it would really go. But all of a sudden there was a great silence, and it sank like a stone. A couple of weeks later, the director told me that the president of CBS thought 1 was a little butch. He didn’t say I was gay, but 1 was completely pan icked. I’d already been kicked out of my sorority at UCLA. I thought of killing myself. I thought they’d tell my parents.... But nothing happened.’ “Nothing, that is,” Rich writes, “except the rapid demise of her TV career—which would in turn lead her by a circuitous route to Harvard Law School and a career as the first openly gay legis lator elected in the nation’s largest state.” m mam o f Ellen (from left) Joely Fisher, Jeremy Piven, David Anthony Higgins and Clea Lewis circle round the star C 1997 Mayer Laboratories. Inc When it feels this good, it’s hard to forget. Y o u w o n ’t fe e l p le a s u r e like th is w ith a n y o th e r c o n d o m . It’s n o t a ra in c o a t, it’s a K im o n o . o what happens after the coming out of Ellen Morgan? Many speculate that we will see increas ing depictions of gay and lesbian char acters on the tube. “With Ellen, we have more than a foot in the door.” says £ HRC’s Red Wing, “we have I a whole body there now.” | But NGLTF spokesman Mark F. Johnson cautions: & “Maybe we should ask, ‘What happens to [the char- £ acter] Ellen now that she’s out?’ We need to let people know that because she’s out, she might lose her job, or her children if she had some, and she can’t get married.... Yes this is an exciting occa sion, but we have to do a reality check.”
