Battered by scandal, 'The Ellen DeGeneres Show' ends its 19-year run on Thursday. Its host is no longer the queer celebrity we can all agree on.
Most of Ellen DeGeneres’ recent coverage hasn’t been kind. But Oprah Winfrey, her talk-show peer, found common ground with DeGeneres in a new interview.Canvassing for a state representative in front of my quiet town hall three years later, or watching the passage of Prop 8 sully Barack Obama’s landmark victory while a senior at USC, I did not trust the arc of history to work its magic. Coming out to my high-school students in Reserve, La.
This is all to say that DeGeneres fell from grace with a thud because she reached such heights the hard way, and because our penchant for making celebrities avatars of change in a world so resistant to it might be our most foolhardy training of all.Ellen DeGeneres did not “betray” queer people. Such a claim presumes that she owes us, or speaks for us, and that impossible burden — one she has faced since she came out on “Ellen” — is part of what landed her in this mess in the first place.
To be sure, DeGeneres didn’t ask for this. None of us did. None of us chose to be born into a society that still fights tooth and nail to control and/or eradicate the expression of queer identity. None of us expected to be waging the same battles over representation our forebears did, 25 years after DeGeneres came out on “Ellen.” None of us dreamed of a culture that creates and dismantles standard-bearers, symbols and icons, instead of allowing everyone a fair shot.
was not her suggestion that DeGeneres lied — we are by now inured to the division between public and private selves, to the building of a personal “brand” — but DeGeneres’s flat-footed, uncomfortable response, unable and unwilling to answer for herself. Above reproach. Beyond criticism. Walled off. As in her interview with Hart, her segment on Bush, her farewell announcements on “Today” and with Oprah, the Dakota Johnson moment inadvertently expressed a central feature of modern American life, and of DeGeneres’ own post-aughts crises: that the very rich and the very famous,