Word: lesbian
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That became a lot harder last September when the news leaked, unintentionally by all accounts, that DeGeneres wanted to have the character she plays on Ellen, her three-year-old ABC sitcom, discover that she--the character, that is--is a lesbian. For DeGeneres, 39, the decision was the culmination of a long process of struggling with feelings about her own sexuality, her fears about being rejected for it, her wish to lead a more honest and open life in public, her weariness at the effort it took her not to. For the public, the news was a sensation...
...hate that term 'in the closet,'" says Ellen DeGeneres, the aforementioned sitcom star whose all-pants wardrobe and sometimes awkward chemistry with male ingenues was provoking curiosity from fans and reporters long before her sexuality became a minor national obsession. "Until recently I hated the word lesbian too," she continues. "I've said it enough now that it doesn't bother me. But lesbian sounded like somebody with some kind of disease. I didn't like that, so I used the word gay more often...
...part of the Walt Disney Co.). Dealing with controversy isn't usually a TV executive's strongest suit. It's not that there aren't already gay characters on television. There are--so many, in fact (22 as of February, according to the Advocate, a national gay-and-lesbian magazine, from the lovelorn Smithers on The Simpsons to the lovelorn Matt on Melrose Place), that one of Ellen's producers offers the half-joking observation that homosexuals "have become the new stock character, like the African-American pal at the workplace...
Richard L. Cherkerzian Jr., a branch officer of the Wainwright Bank, said that his bank "does a tremendous amount of work with the gay and lesbian community...
...plan on going into finance or something along those lines, and I'd always thought of it as a very conservative field, so I was surprised when he said that he hadn't had any problems," said Kathleen M. Douglas '99, who is a lesbian. "From what he said, they are a lot more accepting than I expecte.d...