Gay writer Truman Capote once said, “Fame is only good for one thing – they will cash your check in a small town.” That is a perk. The downside? Everyone knows your business. Particularly the the more embarrassing moments like the breakups, the breakdowns, the lousy career choices and those nasty courtroom dramas.
Lesbian and bisexual celebrities certainly aren’t immune to the troubles that befall their straight – or non-famous – counterparts. In fact, even you may have participated in some regrettable activities last weekend at Pride. Just be glad you didn’t end up as the punch line on The Showbiz Show.
This list is an aggregation of a few of the more memorable missteps taken by some of our favorite lesbian and bisexual celebrities. These aren’t the worst things that could ever happen to a lesbian or bisexual woman, but they were bad enough to make headlines and, in turn, this list. Consider these to be cautionary tales; for each story there is a moral that might help you avoid similar trouble in the future.
1. Ellen DeGeneres plays it straight in the aptly titled Mr. Wrong.
It was 1996, and any lesbian worth her Tevas knew that comedian Ellen DeGeneres was a homo. She wasn’t out yet, but she had a loyal lesbian fan base from her years of stand-up and her sitcom, Ellen. That loyalty even drove some of us to the movie theater to see her first starring role in a feature film, Mr. Wrong. After all, our opening-day dollars could help prove that Ellen was indeed a bankable star, one who should be given more starring roles in the future. Think of it as moviegoing as a form of social activism.
Well, activism does sometimes require sacrifice. I’m sure I’m not the only one who sacrificed two hours and eight bucks (it was 1996!) for a cinematic experience that hovered somewhere between uncomfortable and unbearable. Watching Ellen try to act like a straight ingenue is a little like watching your trusted stylist give you a bad haircut. You want it to stop, but you can’t bring yourself to just get up out of the seat and go home. As I watched Ellen struggle through this film, desperately seeking straight wedded bliss while wearing a constant expression of mild disgust, I was reminded of my high-school years. I didn’t like them the first time around, Ellen; did you have to dredge them up for me again? In fact, the only happy memory I have from seeing this movie is that of a throwaway line in which one character refers to Stevie Nicks as a “rock temptress.” It was like they were reading my mind.
Uniformly panned by critics – the San Francisco Chronicle called it “dreadful” – the movie was released just one year before Ellen came out. And it may have been the cinematic straw that broke the closeted lesbian’s back.
The moral of this story: “Always the bridesmaid, never the bride” isn’t a lament; it’s a solution.
2. Jackie Warner gets two-for-one sushi.Part of the fun of Work Out is watching its star and fitness/fashion maven Jackie Warner strut around Los Angeles like she owns the place. Whether it’s trendy lesbian club East/West, cheesy Mexican restaurant El Coyote or a highbrow yoga center, Warner always acts like she’s in complete control of her environment – and that she’s already begun to grow weary of it.
That’s how the night started when she and her Sky Sport staffers went to listen to fellow trainer Zen’s routine at a comedy club. Jackie slouched in her best rock-star pose with her arm slung casually over the shoulder of bicurious hottie trainer Rebecca. And none of the other staffers made a peep about it. Later, when the gang scooted off to celebrate with Zen at a sushi restaurant, Warner upped the ante by pulling Rebecca into the ladies’ room and making out with her, hot and heavy, in full view of the cameras – and her staff. When the illicit lovers came back to the table, Warner had the serene, self-satisfied look of a freshly fed lion. That is until her other date, Tiffany, showed up. The moment was captured perfectly by bad machine in her recap of the episode:
It’s so awkward when your date shows up and you’ve just finished dry-humping another woman. Jackie decides she needs to shift her attention to Tiffany so she won’t feel uncomfortable and left out. Of course, this just makes Rebecca feel uncomfortable and left out. Jackie gingerly feeds Tiffany a bit of sashimi with her chopsticks while Rebecca looks on with thinly veiled disgust.The sheer panic in Jackie’s eyes when Tiffany appeared was a rare sight indeed, and juggling two women simultaneously without inciting tears or bloodshed was clearly more of a workout for her than any circuit routine.
The moral of this story: When it comes to sushi, you should never order more than you can eat in one sitting. After all, no one likes sloppy seconds.
3. Guestbian Leisha Hailey appears in a very hairy episode of CSI.
Leisha Hailey is the No. 1 girl on the AfterEllen.com Hot 100 for good reason. Several, really: She’s gorgeous, talented and out. We love her so much that we’ll even stop what we’re doing to watch her goofy Yoplait commercials. So if we’re that devoted, it’s a no-brainer to tune in for a Leisha-licious episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, right?
Um, yeah. I guess.
In 2006, Hailey made a guest appearance in the episode “Werewolves” in which she played, well, a werewolf. No, not really. That’s just the cruel schoolyard name for someone who suffers from the disease hypertrichosis, aka “Human Werewolf Syndrome.” In the episode, Leisha plays Allison, the hypertrichosis-suffering, agoraphobic sister of a murdered man.
Looking through all of that mangy brown fur, I could barely make out her impish features. I could swear I was watching a Chaka-centric episode of Land of the Lost and not my favorite crime procedural. This episode of the typically sardonic CSI was a bit sentimental for my tastes, and Leisha’s turn as a lost little lupine girl ended up being unintentionally funny.
The moral of this story: If you’re going to play a mythic creature (or, if you’re going to play with them), stick to lesbian vampires.
4.Suze Orman calls herself a virgin.
You have to admit, it’s pretty cool when one of the most successful and influential (and rich — she’s worth $25 million, with $7 million more in real estate) celebrities comes out as a lesbian. In fact, I can’t think of a better antidote to all of those nasty rumors that lesbians are perpetually broke and lousy tippers. But during her interview with the New York Times in which Orman told the reporter about her long-term relationship with her “life partner” of seven years, Kathy Travis, she made a huge coming-out faux pas. Sure, she correctly bemoaned their lack of access to the heterosexual privileges of legal marriage and, most importantly, the accompanying tax breaks, but she also told the interviewer: “I have never been with a man in my whole life. I’m still a 55-year-old virgin.”
The moral of this story: If your mega-millionaire girlfriend of seven years calls herself a virgin, demand a refund.
5. Melissa Etheridge dons fishnets in Teresa’s Tattoo.
They say true love means never having to say you’re sorry. I say true love is being willing to do femme drag and have it captured on film for all eternity. That’s exactly what Melissa Etheridge did in 1994 for her then-girlfriend, director Julie Cypher, in the film Teresa’s Tattoo. Click here for the trailer.
The film is a tangle of confusing plotlines about kidnappers and mistaken identities, but the real bafflement comes from seeing Melissa Etheridge cooling it at a police station in full-on femme wear. In the trailer, watch closely and you’ll see a brief clip of her sharing a cigarette with star Adrienne Shelly. (Melissa is the one on the right in the ghastly red pumps.)
If after all of these warnings you’re still willing to watch Teresa’s Tattoo, you’ll also see that k.d. lang makes a brief cameo as a religious zealot, which for some reason just doesn’t seem quite as embarrassing as Melissa’s femme drag thing. (Tattoo also stars Facts of Life alum and lesbian icon Nancy McKeon. I guess that’s something.)
The film tanked, and so did Etheridge’s relationship with Cypher (in 2001), but Etheridge escaped her dual fashion and romance disasters unscathed to become an even bigger rock star than she had been before. And she hasn’t been seen in fishnets since.
The moral of this story: You might not regret that ill-advised Tattoo after all.
6. Anne Heche hitches a ride to heaven.
Anne Heche was always a controversial figure in the lesbian community. Her grandiose declarations of love for girlfriend Ellen DeGeneres on Oprah in 1997 seemed to make even Ellen herself a little uncomfortable, and pop culture scholar/loudmouth Camille Paglia questioned Heche’s intentions, compared her to Yoko Ono (in a bad way) and called her the “Volcano Vulture” in an essay for Salon.com.
But none of the Heche naysaying in print or in private could have predicted the enormous crash and burn of the DeGeneres/Heche affair or Heche’s outrageous reaction to it.
In August 2000, on the heels of the breakup, Anne Heche needed to get out of town. Or, more accurately, out of this galaxy. She was found wandering around 40 miles outside of Fresno, Calif., where she had entered a stranger’s home, taken a shower and, according to a Fresno sheriff’s deputy, told everyone “she was God and was going to take everyone back to heaven with her in some sort of spaceship.” She was hospitalized and later admitted that she had been tripping on ecstasy. And that she had an alter ego, Celestia, who was the daughter of God and half-sister of Jesus.
A year later, she married husband Coley Laffoon (they have since divorced) and penned her memoir, Call Me Crazy. And after that, pretty much everyone did. The moral of this story: If you want to take a magic carpet ride, stay out of Fresno.
7. Martina Navratilova gets served (with a palimony suit).
Breakups are bad. And they’re even worse when you have to pay your ex a whopping part of your income for the privilege of never having to deal with her crap again. But what if you had to pay your ex, the nasty breakup makes national headlines, and then said ex writes a trashy tell-all about your doomed romance? Those cheesy E! specials would call this phenomenon “the dark side of Hollywood” – or in this case, Wimbledon.In 1991, Judy Nelson, tennis champion Martina Navratilova’s partner of eight years, filed a palimony suit after being dumped by her famous lesbian girlfriend. Nelson claimed that throughout the course of their relationship she had been paid $90,000 per year for her services as Navratilova’s “maid” (and lover, and traveling companion), and she asked the court to award her 50 percent of Navratilova’s fortunes. The two eventually settled out of court, and the terms of the settlement have never been publicly disclosed.
In 1993, Nelson wrote (or rather “contributed to”) a tell-all about her romance with Navratilova, Love Match: Nelson vs. Navratilova. In it, she offers details of her pre-Navratilova life as a Texas beauty queen and heterosexual wife and mother, as well as her fated first meeting with Navratilova, their romance and their exchange of rings and vows in an empty church in Australia. But wait: It gets worse. Lesbian author Rita Mae Brown, who had also dated Navratilova, wrote the introduction to Judy Nelson’s book, casting Judy as a “latter-day Doris Day.” Maybe that’s because Rita, by that time, was dating Judy. All of this just proves the theory that even in the celezbian world, there are only six of us, and we’ve all already dated.
The moral of this story: Like Kanye West, you too should want prenup.
8. Kristanna Loken takes a bite out of Bloodrayne.
Here at AfterEllen.com, it’s a given that we collectively love Kristanna Loken. It’s not just a given – I’m pretty sure it’s a requirement. She’s out, beautiful, gives candid interviews, is out, is a good actor and is out. Did I mention that she’s out? There are so few actors willing to take the plunge and come out as lesbian or bisexual, and we love her for being one of them.
As far as her acting goes, we thought she rocked The L Word (despite rumored unfriendliness on the set per Loken) this past season, and she classed up the listless sci-fi (ahem) “thriller” Painkiller Jane. But not even Loken’s statuesque beauty and ass-whipping dexterity with a broadsword could save the stink bomb that was Bloodrayne.
Released in 2005, written by out writer/actor Guinevere Turner, and based on a video game (never a good sign), Bloodrayne told the story of an 18th-century half-vampire/half-human who sets out to avenge her mother’s rape by her father. Kind of like what Olivia (Mariska Hargitay) is doing in Law & Order: SVU, but without the intermittent “Dun-DUNNNNNNNN.”
As she sets about avenging, she gets into all sorts of melodramatic scrapes, including a smack down/flirt fest with vampire hunter Katarin (Michelle Rodriguez). The whole thing is a bloody mess that not even Loken’s turn as redhead (!) can salvage.
The moral of this story: If you need a first-class vampire slayer, call Buffy.
