Ellen DeGeneres came out over 20 years ago as a lesbian but she says she still vividly remembers the milestone moment.
Speaking to Dax Shepard on his Armchair Expert podcast, she said, “Ellen ended because I came out. This is a long, long story but they really didn’t want me to come out. I wanted to come out. I said, ‘It’s my life. I want to come out. I want the character to come out. It’s the time.’ I said, ‘I’m going to lose the career. Like, you can just put another show on. It’s my show to lose’ even though it wasn’t my show.”
She added, “They finally let me come out, and it was a huge success. It was huge. It was celebrated and then they just stopped promoting it because everybody was scared. We were losing sponsors, so they were just acting like, ‘We’re just letting it glide. We’re not going to touch it.’ I got no more advertising, I got no more promotion. So they cancelled it.”
DeGeneres expressed that she faced significant backlash after the show ended. She explained, “During the time, because there was so much talk about it, everyone was just sick of it. I had only done the cover of Time magazine, a primetime special with Diane Sawyer and Oprah those were the only three places I talked but people were reporting on reports and reports and reports.”
Ellen elaborated, “Even Elton John said, ‘Shut up already. We know you’re gay. Be funny,’ I had never met him and I thought, ‘What kind of support is that from a gay person?’ But everybody assumed I was just nonstop talking about. It hurt my feelings,” and added, “People were making fun of me. I was really depressed. And because of that and because the show was cancelled, I was looked at as a failure in this business. No one would touch me. I had no agent, I had no possibility of a job, I had nothing.”
