There are a few television events that will go down in history as watershed moments marking significant changes in American culture. In 1968 Star Trek aired television’s first interracial kiss between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura—one year after the Supreme Court ruled that barring interracial marriage was unconstitutional. In a 1972 episode of Maude, an All in the Family spinoff, Maude decided to have an abortion—one year before Roe v. Wade legalized a woman’s right to choose. In 1989, at the height of the AIDS crisis, ABC reportedly lost $1 million in advertising when an episode of thirtysomething showed two gay men in bed together; later on, one of the two men was diagnosed as HIV positive.

And in April 1997, Ellen DeGeneres came out on her sitcom Ellen and in real life—a year after Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act.

Ellen’s coming-out on “The Puppy Episode” was significant not only because it was the first time a leading primetime character was gay, but because the character was also played by an openly gay actor. In addition, Ellen’s real-life coming-out with then-girlfriend Anne Heche became a media frenzy, followed by a huge backlash that essentially wrote the book on how to not come out in Hollywood.

The mid-1990s weren’t the best of times for the gay rights movement, but they weren’t the worst of times, either. Despite the passage of DOMA in 1996, the media had recently embraced lesbianism as “chic”; k.d. lang posed on the cover of Vanity Fair with Cindy Crawford giving her a shave; and Melissa Etheridge was selling millions as an out lesbian rocker.

In 1997, there were reportedly 22 lesbian or gay characters in supporting roles on television, and many critics proclaimed that Ellen’s coming-out wasn’t news at all—if anything, they argued, it was a publicity stunt to save her declining sitcom.

When Ellen first premiered on ABC in March 1994 as a midseason replacement, it was titled These Friends of Mine and was touted as ABC’s response to Seinfeld. It quickly rocketed onto the top of the ratings charts, and in its first season it ranked at number 13. In its second season the sitcom was reframed to focus on Ellen’s character, Ellen Morgan, and renamed Ellen.