Betty DeGeneres - Love, Ellen: A Mother/Daughter Journey

To my kids: Vance, Ellen, and Anne.

And to all those whose parents have rejected them.

I love you all.

M IM E ICHLER- R IVAS . I love Mim Eichler-Rivas. I thank her for her powers of organization and structurefor inspiring, prodding, and pushing me. Thanks to Rob Weisbach for his guidance and encouragement and thanks to the whole terrific team at Rob Weisbach Books. Thanks to Elizabeth Birch and the Human Rights Campaign for filling my life with love and giving me the job I think I was meant to do. Being the first non-gay spokesperson for the National Coming Out Project has been the most fulfilling work I could ever imagine. Thanks to David Smith for keeping me on schedule, telling me where Im going and when, and being my number-one cheer-leader. David, and everyone at HRC, gave me confidence that I could do this work long before I should have been confident. Thanks to Bob Witeck and Wes Combs for their inspired speech writing. Thanks to Jan Sonnenmair, photographer extraordinaire. Thanks to Bob Barnett and Jacqueline Davies for their expertise. Thanks to all of you, my dear new friends, for telling me your stories. And thanks to all of you, whose names I will never know, who shared your feelings of hope and despair with me.

Thanks to my sister Helen, my son, Vance, and my daughters, Ellen and Anne. Thanks for your excellent advice and your love. I couldnt live without them.

Thanks to all in our family, who have always been supportive and proud. And last, but certainly not least, thanks to all my friends across the countryboth old and new. You know who you are. I love you all.

Finally, I must acknowledge Matthew Shepard. His tragic death affects every human being. His suffering leaves us all diminishedand we must never forget him.

P ASS C HRISTIAN , M ISSISSIPPI
1978

T HREE WORDS, SPOKEN two decades ago by my daughter Ellen at the age of twenty, changed my life forever. In an instant, her bombshell shattered many of my long-held beliefs about who she was, who I was, and about life itself.

Nothing in the months, days, hours, or minutes leading up to that moment could have prepared me for what she would tell me that day. Twenty minutes earlier, just before Ellen suggested we go for a walk on the beach, we had been enjoying a large, relatively uneventful family gathering in Pass Christian on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

This small beach community is an hours drive from New Orleans, Louisiana, where I grew up and raised my two kids, Vance and Ellen. It is where my oldest sister, Helen, lived for many years with her family in their lovely, comfortable home on West Beach Boulevard, facing the water. The house, set far back from the boulevard, has a wide screened porch and a large front yard full of shade trees. Inside, the spacious living room has a well-used fireplace and the large dining room opens onto a cozy sunroom.

From the time our kids were small, Helens was an ideal place to gather for holidays and other happy occasions. At Thanksgiving, Christmas, summer picnic reunions, and other celebrations our number would swell, with grandparents, cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, and a few neighbors and friends. Lots of us! Yet we never felt that we were intruding or had overstayed our welcome.

For those winter holiday feasts, the dining room always managed to accommodate us all; afterward wed share long, leisurely hours by the fire. In warm weather, we always ate outdoors, at picnic tables in the front yard. We have home movies of all the children swinging on a rope tied to a tall tree branch. Theyd stand on a picnic table to catch it as it swung by.

To escape the heat we could sit on the screened porch or relax in a hammock. Of course, when it was really hot, every-one headed for the beachto sit on the sand or swim or go sailing in the Sunfish.

The house on West Beach Boulevard has a wealth of cherished memories for me. Like old photographs, many of those happy moments have faded in my mind with the passage of time, the different years blurring one into the next. And yet, I can vividly recall this particular life-changing visit, which came at the end of the summer of 1978.

At the time, I was living eight hours away in Atlanta, Texas, with my then husband, whom I had married after divorcing Vance and Ellens father several years earlier. Vance, the older of my two kids, couldnt be with us; he was in Yuma, Arizona, finishing up his two years of service in the Marines, after already having started to make a name for himself in comedy writing and rock music. Ellen, however, was able to make it. She was living just an hour away in New Orleans at her dads house, so she rode over to Helens with us.

That meant a chance to do some catching up. Living so far away from each other was hard on both of us. We were always extremely close and missed the luxury of being together on a daily basis. In those days, Ellen was still struggling to find a direction for herself. After graduating from high school, she had tried college for all of a month, only to conclude that wasnt for her. She then embarked on what would ultimately become one of the longest lists of jobs known to humankindeverything from vacuum cleaner salesperson to oyster shuckerbefore finding her true calling. But even then, Ellen had a knack for describing even the most mundane details of her struggles and making them sound hilarious or dramatic. That weekend was no exception. So I had no reason to suspect that anything was different or out of the ordinary about Ellen.

Nor did it seem unusual when, after we all finished dinner late that afternoon, El said to me, Lets go out for one more walk on the beach.

When we crossed West Beach Boulevard and walked down the steps of the seawall, I began to sense that she had something on her mind. Probably, I imagined, it was her latest job, or maybe a new boyfriend. But we werent really talking much as we walked across the broad, sandy beach down to the hard-packed sand by the waters edge. The cool salty breeze felt wonderful as we walked along and my daughter, at my side, was a pretty sight. With her straight blond hair and her sparkling blue eyes, she really was the essence of the girl next door. What a treat to be together, walking along quietly.

But suddenly Ellen stopped, and I turned back to see why. She had tears in her eyes, which alarmed me. As I walked toward her in concern, she began to cry, and it was then that she sobbed with a depth of emotion I will never forget and spoke those three words: Mom, Im gay.

In my mind, everything stopped. This was the biggest shock of my life and the last thing I had ever expected to hear. Still reeling, I reached out to comfort her. She was upset and crying, so I did the most natural thing a mother would doI took her into my arms and hugged her. No mother wants to see her child in pain.

Reassuring her that I loved her was my first priority. But it would take time for the words she had just spoken to sink in. There was no way I could comprehend or process or accept this news immediately. My shock was coupled with disbelief. As close as we were, this was not the Ellen I knew. On the other hand, if we had been living in the same city and had been in more constant touch, I probably would have had some clues.

It was my turn to talk, but I didnt know what to say. A hundred different thoughts and emotions were racing through me. In my mind I was frantically reaching, searching for any question, any argument, that would bring her back to her sensesback to being the lovely, young heterosexual daughter she always had been.

Heterosexual daughter. That thought gripped me. It is such a natural assumption that we dont even have to consider the word. It isnt even in our usual vocabulary. We just are. But now, I had to consider another word that wasnt in my usual vocabularyhomosexual. My homosexual daughter just thinking those strange words brought on a new wave of emotion that I recognized as fear. I feared for Ellens well-being, given societys prejudiced and negative attitudes. Though I had almost no exposure to gay people at all, I knew the derogatory names used for them, and I didnt want my daughter called those names.