Brava Meredith Baxter!! (Your Membership Kit Should Arrive Shortly)

Just watched the online Today show interview clip in which Meredith Baxter, best known as Elyse Keaton, the mom on the popular '80s sitcom Family Ties, came out to Matt Lauer. It was terrific. Watching her, and watching Lauer draw her out with such sensitivity and skill, was a genuine treat; I smiled all the way through it.

It was twice the treat, in fact, because as I was hurriedly putting myself together for work this morning I slowed to watch the shot of Lauer, standing outside the studio with Meredith Viera and Al Roker, giving the teaser for the upcoming interview with Baxter in which he hinted at her decision to share a "secret".

"Gay!" I thought immediately, then laughed at my presumption. Ah, Lorraine, you think everybody's gay. I grabbed the remote, clicked off the set, grabbed up my coat and bag, and went out the door and into my day, not giving it another thought.

Then I came home, turned on my pc, opened up my browser and--gasp!-- there was the "coming out" story on my homepage with Baxter's picture beside it!

Sweeeet!! :0)

I thought Baxter was very classy, didn't you?--forthright about her anxieties over such a public disclosure of her private life (Um, yeeeah, do celebrities really have those anymore? Did they ever?) and candid about her reasons for doing so (A looming tabloid disclosure *sigh*). She was also warmly funny relating how she'd earlier come out to her five grown kids--her eldest "smart-aleck" son cheekily told her he already knew--and her step-dad, Emmy-winning writer-producer Alan Manings ("Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In", "One Day At A Time", "Good Times", et al) who in reply to her nervous announcement that she was dating women said something along the lines of "Really? So am I!"

Baxter told Lauer that she'd also come out to her Family Ties family, Michael Gross who played husband, Steven, and the "kids", Justine Bateman, Tina Yothers and of course Michael J. Fox. (Oh yeah, and I suppose I should include Brian Bonsall, who played the adorable 1986 edition to the Keaton household, Andrew). Happily, according to Baxter, both her real and fictional families, as well as her friends, have been supportive and loving. I'm delighted for her, and for all of them.

But especially for her.

Some LGBT people may take issue with the awkward timing of Meredith Baxter's announcement--it is unfortunate that it took the threat of a tabloid "outing" to convince Baxter to acknowledge her queerness, and personally I hate the idea of anyone, famous or not, coming out under duress--but good on her for deciding to tell her life story her own way rather than leaving it to a supermarket gossip rag to do the deed.

Though I have nothing but admiration for LGBT people who come out young, especially those with public profiles--more of that, please-- in some ways I most admire late-in-life gays who finally stand up and step forward. I speak from painful experience when I say here that the longer you avoid telling what you know to be The Truth, the more convinced you can become that speaking out will be the cataclysmic end of everything, and the harder it can get ever to find the words and the courage to do it.

All that said, watching Baxter's coming out today is for me a bittersweet thing; I so wish the profile of African-American LGBTs was higher, by which I mean, existent. How much longer will we all have to wait to have the pleasure of watching similar Big Reveals from the likes of... oh, pick anybody. Seriously, go ahead--pick anyone. If we're really expected to believe, as we approach the second decade of the 21st Century, that all of today's black entertainers and persons of note--be they tv stars, movie stars, R&B, hip-hop and pop stars, athletes, journalists, politicos, reality-show divas or various and sundry other media movers and shakers--are all heterosexual, why not assume they're all gay as well? Holds about the same amount of logic.

Wait, you're saying, what about--? Yeah, I know... I know about African-American LGBT luminaries such as singer Johnny Mathis, dancer-choreographer Bill T. Jones and writers Alice Walker and Jewelle Gomez, to name a few... but more importantly I wonder how many other Americans, black or white, can say the same? Because that I'm aware, I've never known any of them to sit with a Matt Lauer, a Barbara Walters or an Oprah Winfrey on national television and talk plainly about the experience of being lesbian or gay or bisexual. (If I've missed something, speak up--I'd like nothing better than to be contradicted on this point!) And it needs to be said that far too often when the celebrated likes of James Baldwin or Bessie Smith or Lorraine Hansberry or Malcolm X are profiled for Black History Month, their non-heterosexuality is either downplayed to a footnote or airbrushed entirely out of the bio.

Which leaves me feeling... less than celebratory.