When the Stars Come Out: Jodie Foster’s Queer Families and the Celebrity Private Sphere

Am I your passion your promise your end? I say I am, yes I am Your passion your promise your end, yes I am

—Melissa Etheridge¹

When Jodie Foster came out at the 2013 Golden Globes, her revelation (such as it was) was greeted with empathy, cynicism, and confusion. What was she saying? Did she actually come out if she didn’t say the word “lesbian?” This should prompt the question—What does it mean for a celebrity to come out in the 21^st century? Most of them don’t, even as the larger culture has become dramatically more knowledgeable about and supportive of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) people. Does a celebrity coming out still matter?

Following the 1997 “Puppy Episode” in which her daughter Ellen announced she was a lesbian, GLBTQ activist Betty DeGeneres told fans that: “Coming out is a gift.” But what kind of a gift? And to whom was it given? Like Ellen, some celebrities have come out not just to relieve anxiety about the dissonance between their private and public lives, but also because they have come to believe that they should use their influence on behalf of social justice. The GLBTQ movement that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s enrolled the support of prominent GLBTQ people, many of whom urged others still in the closet that they could both serve as role models and also demonstrate how many influential and accomplished queers there were. Celebrity outings were part of a long transformation from radical and highly sexualized street activism to the promotion of “homonormativity,” a 21^st-century civil rights agenda that sought inclusion in, rather than transformation of, the public sphere. In particular, homonormativity emphasized overcoming barriers to family formation, through domestic partnership, adoption, child rearing, and ultimately, gay marriage.²

When Ellen DeGeneres came out on her sitcom, “Ellen,” in 1997, this political work had failed to produce tangible political change, and some of the achievements of gay liberation had become more fragile. This made “The Puppy Episode”—and the many social fears that Ellen’s character articulated as she searched for love—particularly significant. During the Clinton administration, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” had replaced a ban on gays in the military; the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld criminal sodomy laws in Bowers v. Hardwick;³ and the president had signed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), making federal recognition of gay and lesbian marriages illegal.⁴ Simultaneously, by the 1990s, partly because the legislative environment was unwelcoming, the AIDS activist organization ACT UP (and successors like Queer Nation) had made media strategies crucial to advancing a queer policy agenda.

DeGeneres’s coming out was historic in its scope, suggesting a new political role for celebrities who were willing to go public with a private sexual identity.⁵ Likewise, in a political atmosphere in which conservatives articulated GLBTQ citizens as a threat to family, mobilizing supportive families on behalf of a queer agenda opened a second front in the fight for rights. Parents and siblings could exercise heterosexual privilege on behalf of a gay rights agenda, but, more radically, they could also speak firsthand about the family as a homophobic institution in need of reform. Following the lead of activist Jeanne Manford, who had founded Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) in 1972, prominent parents of queers, significant and insignificant, began to offer themselves as experts to homophobic parents in need of support, education, and correction. Betty DeGeneres, for example, experienced “relief” when Ellen came out, not only because she “too would be able to come out of the closet,” but because she would be able to use her bully pulpit as a celebrity mother to speak out about homophobia.⁶

Coming out as a kind of public gift giving—to one’s self, family, and the larger GLBTQ community—structured the expectations around Jodie Foster’s acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Globes in 2013. And yet...