After
Ellen comes out to the entire airport (including her
real-life mother, Betty DeGeneres, who played an extra waiting
to board the plane), Ellen dreams about visiting a grocery store
in which melons are on sale—but only for lesbians. The grocery
store dream sequence provided an opportunity to include many of
those Hollywood actors, and also to address, obliquely, some of
the anxiety around being out in public. Just in case viewers didn’t
get the message, Oprah-the-therapist overtly discusses homophobia
at Ellen’s next therapy session, framing it in comparison
to racism:
ELLEN: I don't know, I thought if I just ignored it, it would
just go away and I could live a normal life.
THERAPIST: And what is a normal life, Ellen?
ELLEN: I don't know. Normal. I mean, just the same thing everybody
wants, someone to ... A house with a picket fence, a dog, a cat,
Sunday barbecues. Someone to love, someone who loves me. Someone
I can build a life with. I just want to be happy.
THERAPIST: And you think you can't have these things with a woman?
ELLEN: Well, society has a pretty big problem with it. There are
a lot of people out there who think people like me are sick. Oh
God, why did I ever rent Personal Best.
THERAPIST: You can't blame this on the media, Ellen. It isn't
going to be easy. No one has it easy.
ELLEN: You don't understand. Do you think I want to be discriminated
against? Do you think that I want people calling me names to my
face?
THERAPIST: To have people commit hate crimes against you because
you're not like them?
ELLEN: Thank you!
THERAPIST: To have to use separate bathrooms and separate water
fountains and sit in the back of the bus?
ELLEN: Oh, man, we have to use separate water fountains?
Later in the episode Ellen comes out to her friends, who are so
supportive of her they take her to Little Frida’s, a real
lesbian coffeehouse in West Hollywood, to listen to a parody of
1970s women’s music sung by k.d. lang. At the conclusion
of the episode, Melissa Etheridge gives Susan a toaster oven as
her tongue-in-cheek reward for converting another woman to lesbianism.
Ratings
for “The Puppy Episode” were significantly
higher than Ellen’s average ratings that season;
approximately 42 million viewers watched Ellen come out on primetime.
Although Chrysler decided to not buy ad time for the episode,
claiming that it was their policy to avoid hot-button issues,
it was the only corporate sponsor who withdrew from the show—and
only for “The Puppy Episode.” The episode won an Emmy
for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series in 1997, as well as
a GLAAD Media Award and a Peabody Award in 1998.
But
all the praise was swamped by a negative conservative backlash.
The right-wing group Media Research took out a full-page ad on
the back cover of Variety on April 17 claiming that ABC
and Disney were “promoting homosexuality to America’s
families.” Pat Robertson, Phyllis Schafly, Rev. Donald Wildmon,
and Rev. Jerry Falwell joined a group of antigay right-winters
to sign a scathing letter characterizing “The Puppy Episode”
as “a slap in the face to America’s families.”
