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Roseanne talks about her famous kiss with Mariel Hemingway

Roseanne Barr went on Huff Post Live today where she was asked about her famous kiss with Mariel Hemingway on Roseanne in 1994. (She says it was the first ever kiss on network TV, but that honor actually goes to LA Law in 1991.)

“It’s so different to watch it now … well ‘cuz they’ve repackaged it as ‘the gay kiss show,’ and it was a gay kiss, but it was, to me, that was a show about homophobia. They threatened to cancel it and everything. My brother and sister are both gay and I just got tired of hearing bullshit about it so I wanted to do it. I kept thinking about stuff I could do and rules I could break because I’m a comic and that’s what I like. I tried to do that a lot. It was fun.”

Even if Roseanne didn’t have the first lesbian kiss on TV, the show was incredibly progressive in how it presented homosexuality, and had one of the first regular bisexual characters in Nancy (played by out actress Sandra Bernhard), as well as a lesbian character, Marla, played by Morgan Fairchild.

Roseanne’s boss/friend, Leon, was also a gay man, and these characters were made even more revolutionary in that they existed within a small Midwestern town, the fictional Lanford, Illinois. And even though she dated dudes on the show, Sara Gilbert‘s Darlene will always remain a lesbian icon in her own right.

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