Anne Heche was everywhere on the TV airwaves last week, promoting her autobiography, Call Me Crazy, which ended the week at No. 6 on the Bestsellers list. Heche's book details her own memories of sexual abuse at the hands of her father, starting when she was an infant. Her father died of AIDS when Heche was just 13, and her brother allegedly killed himself in a car crash three months later.
Heche's sisters and mother deny the abuse existed, and one sister said if it did occur, her mother certainly did not know about it.
The Barbara Walters 20/20 report Sept. 5 was most revealing. However, many could not help but wonder if this new chapter in Anne's life seems just too well-scripted. She married her boyfriend earlier this month, and announced to Barbara that she is three months pregnant. She said she was insane for the first 31 years of her life, and now she is suddenly cured.
Heche has also had to answer questions about comments she made that sex with Ellen DeGeneres was the best she'd had. She clarifies that it was up to that point in her life...that certainly she's not comparing it to her husband. Heche, 32, and Coleman "Coley" Laffoon, 27, were married days before the 20/20 interview ran on ABC.
Anne, who also called herself "Celestia," and believed she was a spokesperson for God on earth, was quite cavalier in most of her interviews...though at times she did get emotional. It just all seemed like such an act.
Having read about half of her book so far, I feel very moved if her stories are true. But it seems quite removed from the Anne Heche we see on TV. In fact, the reading of her story is at least somewhat more believable than the watching of her on TV.
USA Today reported: "The actress says she was insane during her three-year relationship with DeGeneres, which ended last year. She says she regained her sanity about a year ago, after she was found wandering in Fresno, Calif., in a confused state, shortly after her breakup with DeGeneres."
The timing of Heche's coming-out-of-abuse tale certainly was the worst of it. Shouldn't this have been the week Ellen DeGeneres was on the airwaves promoting her Sunday hosting of the Emmy Awards, and the debut of her CBS sitcom next Monday, Sept. 17? This was Ellen's time for the limelight, and Anne could not wait to distract the media. Anne herself is now in development with Warner Bros. for a TV show for next fall. Maybe it will air opposite Ellen's.
Heche's father, Donald, was a choir director in a Baptist church. She said he began sexually abusing her when she was still a toddler and that she contracted herpes from him.
Oscar night 1997, Heche says, "I saw the most ravishing woman I had ever seen in my life standing across the room. Her name was Ellen DeGeneres. She was radiating. I think at certain times in people's lives you just radiate an energy and a glow of fabulousness. And that was her. I had never seen anybody so lit up." They slept together that night. "Up until that point, that was the best sex I'd ever had," says Heche of her first same-sex sexual experience. "I felt cared for...I felt free to express a part of me that I had not been able to express with a man. I felt sensuous and sexual in a way I hadn't before."
One year ago, here's what Anne said happened: "I was told to go to a place where I would meet a spaceship. I was told in order to get on the spaceship that I would have to take a hit of Ecstasy. Fresno was the culmination of a journey and a world that I thought I needed to escape to in order to find love."
Heche met her new husband while working on a documentary about Ellen. She denies that the new relationship caused the breakup. "How do you put into a sentence why you break up with somebody? We had gotten to the point where we were not happy together anymore. We had become isolated from the world, together."
Heche says she does not label herself straight, gay or bisexual, and Laffoon is also as open-minded. "He's an extraordinary guy. He's one of the few people I've ever met who actually embraces the same notion about sexuality that I do...which is that you love who you love. You fall in love with a person, not a sex. I would never limit myself to saying I would be with a man or a woman."
What does it all mean? Well, the LGBT community is certainly strong enough to survive this media frenzy. Some in the media want to see the message as Anne was "cured" of her craziness at the same time she was cured of her lesbianism. Even Anne does not view her story that way. So her's is just one more story...in the end, hopefully GLBTs see her case as one of tragedy and abuse, not a "cure" for homosexuality. Who knows, in a few years, maybe she'll re-write this story and say this was all just a dream she had.
... Tracy Baim
COMIC STRIP'S GAY
CHARACTER ATTACKED
The Sept. 6-8 nationally syndicated comic strip "For Better or For Worse" reintroduced Lawrence, a gay character who first appeared in 1993. "For Better or For Worse," created by Lynn Johnston in 1979, tells the story of John and Elly Patterson and their children: Michael, Elizabeth and April. The strip, which appears in more than 2,000 papers in 25 countries, won a GLAAD Media Award in 1998 for Outstanding Comic Strip.
In the current story, Michael chooses Lawrence...his childhood best friend...to be the best man at his wedding. The mother of the bride objects to the presence of a gay man at the wedding and says to her daughter, "But Deanna, this is a church!!"
Editors from at least two dozen papers had requested alternate strips from United Media, the strip's syndicator. These strips will not allude to Lawrence's sexual orientation. E-mail glaad@glaad.org for details.
'CHELSEA BOYS' on the air
Film Roman, producer of The Simpsons and King of the Hill, has signed a deal to develop the popular syndicated comic strip Chelsea Boys, created by Glen Hanson and Allan Neuwirth, as the first gay animated TV series.
The strip, currently appearing in magazines, newspapers and websites throughout the U.S., Canada and the U.K., including in Windy City Times, revolves around the lives and loves of three gay roommates residing in New York's trendy Chelsea neighborhood.
Hanson ( Spy Groove, Beetlejuice, Daria ) and Neuwirth ( Courage the Cowardly Dog, Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss, Big Bag ) both have many prior credits as designers, writers and producers of animated television fare. See www.chelseaboys.com .