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Interview With Pepper and Judy Lane of “Trading Spouses”

This Friday on Fox’s reality show Trading Spouses, in the second of a two-parter that began last Friday, lesbian couple Pepper and Judy Lane face down homophobic Julie Chase and her bizarrely outmoded opinions about gay people. In last week’s episode, Julie refused to use the restroom in a gay restaurant, likened being gay to a birth defect and made offensive comments about the disabled – and that was just the tip of the iceberg. Who knows what bile Julie will spew on tonight’s concluding episode?

If this all sounds a bit too familiar for you, it may be because you remember when ABC’s Wife Swap switched out a conservative Christian mom for a lesbian one – also during a sweeps period. But Julie makes Wife Swap‘s Kris Gillespie, who called lesbians “depraved,” seem like an angel in comparison.

Judy and Pepper Lane, the San Diego couple on Trading Spouses, have reacted to Julie’s hatred with admirable calm and have been a beacon of strong, positive gay representation, sidestepping the blatantly offensive Julie and her generally dysfunctional family. Committed, nurturing and thoroughly family-oriented, Judy and Pepper have won a small victory for all LGBT parents this week: respect. We talked with them yesterday about the support they have received from straight and gay people alike in the wake of last week’s episode, and whether Julie really was that cruel.

AfterEllen.com: First of all, what attracted you to the show, and how did you go about getting on it?

Judy Lane: We belong to a group called San Diego Family Matters, which is made up of gay and lesbian parents in San Diego, and periodically they have events and workshops and all sorts of things. We got an email from our executive director [of San Diego Family Matters] saying that Trading Spouses was looking for same-sex couples to participate. I got it in my email, and I shot it over to Pepper to say, “Hey, look at this.” She wrote back, thinking she was writing to me saying, “Let’s go for it,” but what she had done was send it back to the executive director and to Fox Studios.

AE: Did you have any hesitation about going on network TV and being so visible?

Pepper Lane: With the process for getting picked, we started in June and didn’t film until October, so there was a lot of hurry and wait. And we kept thinking, “It’s not going to happen,” but as it became more real, we began to get nervous. Our biggest concern was the children – not because of the gay issue, but because we were concerned that they [the producers or those on the show] might hurt their feelings or somehow make the children look bad, and that was our huge concern. Also, it had to be a positive, fun experience for them. The four of us talked periodically, asking, “Are we sure we all want to do this?” And no matter when or how close we were, if anybody wanted to back out, then that was OK, and there’d be no hard feelings.

AE: Have you been pleased with the way the show presents you so far?

PL: I’m very happy. My biggest worry was … I spent the week with Julie, I knew what she was like, and I knew what happened in front of me, but they do these off-site interviews with each of us, and … I was a little worried she might have said something demeaning to the kids, and that was a big concern. But the way they showed our family was great. … I think people think it’s a little one-sided towards us being nice, but I know for a fact that they actually edited out some of the worst things [Julie] said. It is what it is. We didn’t go out there to be like “the gay family of reality TV,” we just went out to have fun on a TV show, just like any other family.

JL: The best thing about this is all the positive feedback we’ve gotten – I’m overwhelmed. Our phone rings day and night; our email is bombarded; we have fan letters, people coming to our house from all walks of life. The Mormon families of our neighborhood in particular came over to our house and said, “We just think you’re a beautiful family, and we’re proud to have you as neighbors.” Our heads are spinning!

PL: It’s amazing. I’ll go to the grocery store, and someone will come up to me and say, “I would’ve kicked her ‘blank’!” They say such nice things, almost as if they’re feeling they have to apologize for the way we were treated, feeling as if they wanted to say, “Not all straight people are like that.” It’s been very overwhelming and very humbling.

AE: It seems as if the family you were paired up with was perhaps more ignorant regarding gay issues and gay people.

JL: [They were ignorant] about a lot of things, not just gay [issues]. I think Pepper described her as the “equal opportunity offender.”

AE: How do you deal with someone like that when you have a camera on you, and you can’t necessarily retaliate as much as you’d like to?

JL: Pepper and I went to a pride workshop on Saturday; they go around the country and train people to represent while public speaking and what to say. So apparently we did the right thing, which was not to lash back, but to be as calm as possible and just educate.

PL: Well, it was hard; it was a lot of shock and awe. If there wasn’t a camera around, I probably would’ve had more words to bleep out. [Laughs.] I didn’t have time to react much to her because it was relentless … it just kept coming. And when I finally do step up to her, I was just trying to break it down to a level she would understand. Not by saying I was smarter than her, at all. She pushed me a little too far, and you forget the cameras are there.

AE: Did you feel any specific pressure as a lesbian couple to represent yourselves to a very general audience?

JL: When our executive director told us, “Do us proud!” we almost fainted! We hadn’t thought about that until she said that. But we pretty much just are who we are. We’ve always been out; we’re out in the school; we’re out everywhere we go; we are who we are. But suddenly when she said that, we realized we had a great responsibility.

PL: It was just a matter of us being who we were and getting through the week.

AE: On the show’s website, your family’s profile is very positive and used the term “family values.” Do you feel the network was almost going overboard to make it seem as if you’re a normal family?

PL: I think it played out the way it did, and I don’t think Fox had any motivation behind what they did besides trying to put people that were different together. The fact that we came out looking so mainstream and normal is just kind of how we are. Our friends and family would tell you that we’re no different from what you saw.

JL: I don’t think it was overkill, because we are family oriented. And the conservative right … well, let them hear the words “family values,” and let them see a gay family. Just because we aren’t [a family] by their definition, it doesn’t mean that we aren’t. I think the producers asked us when we were interviewing what we thought “family” means. Any group of people who cohabitate and provide unconditional love and support for one another is a family by my definition.

PL: If you just looked at the pictures on the website of the two families, of Julie and her family — straight man, straight woman and their two teenage daughters — that’s the norm in society. Then you look at us, and it’s two women living together, not legally married, sort of like the square peg in a round hole. But then you get to know us, and what comes out is that problems and dysfunctions could be in any family. It had nothing to do with being gay or straight. Their dysfunction had nothing to do with that, and our function has nothing to do with it.

Trading Spouses airs Friday nights at 9:00 p.m. EST on Fox.

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