When Julie Cypher and Melissa Etheridge broke up, my mother asked me one question: “What will happen to the children?” The answer, of course, is roughly the same as it is for any kids that grow up with divorced parents. It’s anyone’s guess. The recent baby boom among celebrities and lesbian and gay couples is cutting a wide swath through all levels of media.
The cover of US magazine says it all. Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones are dressed in white, angelic and pensive, holding their new baby. The child is two weeks old, which means that Douglas and Zeta-Jones wasted no time in squeezing the mother’s milk out of this media opportunity. With a little plastic surgery, a fleet of nannies, and a pair of eight figure box office salaries, this family could be yours.
The photos inside are staged shots of the entire Douglas clan holding the baby; there’s a naked Zeta-Jones holding the baby and lurid portraits of the happy couple kissing in bed, holding the baby. It’s a publicist’s wet American dream. How many mothers pluck their eyebrows within two weeks of delivering a baby?
The spread is reminiscent of at least a dozen recent media frenzies around celebrities and their babies. Sharon Stone and her adorable husband hold their adopted baby, wearing white in US magazine. Courtney Love dresses as an angel, holding Frances Bean in Vanity Fair. Melissa Etheridge, Julie Cypher, and David Crosby, hold the children they’ve created together in Rolling Stone.
When heterosexuals show off their babies for media attention, it screams publicity stunt. When lesbians and gay men do the same thing, we reason that if the world sees pictures of our famous babies, they’ll stop thinking we’re promiscuous child molestors.
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"When Julie Cypher and Melissa Etheridge broke up, my mother asked me one question: 'What will happen to the children?'"
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I’m consciously not using LGBT here, because the media has yet to show bisexual and transgender people having families. Well, maybe bisexual. Since Ellen Degeneres and Ann Heche broke up, tabloid reports of Ann’s alleged dalliances with men have given rise to traitorous accusations and cries of lesbian mutiny. So yes, the media is sort of covering bisexuals, but not well. Despite tabloid reports that Heche is pregnant, there were no kids involved in her relationship with Degeneres, even though they spoke frequently of having children. So whether there were kids or not, by speaking of babies, they created a virtual family in the public’s imagination.
So what does it mean for the rest of us when celebrity queer couples break up? I thought we’d learned our lesson about deifying the celebrity couple when Bob Jackson and Rod Paris went the whole nine yards, hyphenating their names and doing the media rounds, only to fizzle. This was especially disappointing because there are so few visible gay male couples. Ellen Degeneres and Ann Heche came barreling into the spotlight, tearfully declaring each other “Wife” within weeks of meeting. Even Ellen’s mother Betty got in on the act, referring to Heche as her “daughter-in-law.” They did Oprah together, they did countless Human Rights Campaign appearances together, and they made blonde TV movies together. Then comes the news that Miss Heche has stumbled onto the doorstep of an avowed fan, mumbling incoherently about the breakup, allegedly overdosing on ecstasy. Trouble in paradise, kids.
But nothing could have prepared me for the nearly simultaneous announcement of the Etheridge/Cypher split. Why, just months earlier, they were making nice for reporters when David Crosby was announced as the sperm donor in “The New American Family.” I figured they’d make it, simply because they’d started their relationship outside the media spotlight and had made it for twelve years. But there it was, the short and sweet announcement that the poster children had parted ways. Somebody bring me some water!
LGBT people are starved for positive media imagery. We long to see our lives, relationships, and families reflected in popular culture. So starved, in fact, that when we find a couple gullible enough to be sacrificial lambs for the movement, we cannibalize them. We airbrush them and put them on covers, add their names to phony boards of directors, make them Pride grand marshals and demand that they reveal every detail of their lives in print. They cooperate and in many cases are willing participants. Political organizations use them to raise money and the couples gleefully roll up their sleeves and pitch in, happy to “do what they can.” Lately, this media attention has been won at the expense of those relationships.
We’ve certainly mastered “celebrating” our queer relationships, and these rock star couplings have done their part in teaching straight people and mainstream media outlets to do the same. Now these folks need to learn to honor their relationships by figuring out how to maintain privacy that isn’t about being closeted. That’s the trick. And I don’t care if you’re gay or straight, keep your babies to yourself. Youngsters should not be shamelessly peddled for media exposure. Whether you’re selling magazines or gay liberation, hawking your kid for public consumption is not a fantastic idea.
The moral of this story is that we are, indeed, just like straight people. Now that there are queer celebrities, offering up their lives and babies for all to see, their foibles and breakups are fair game for exploitative reporters. Which, in a perverse way, is a sort of progress. Heather has two mommies and they’re breaking up. Now, THAT’S the American Dream.
