Honesty Is the Best Policy

Tonight’s “Ellen” features lots of hot lesbian sex, passionate speeches advocating homosexuality for everyone and an “800” recruiting number that females can call to learn how they, too, can become lesbians. And Barbie-loving girls in pigtails will adore those “How to Become Ken” kits they can order through the series.

KIDDING!!!

That’s merely the irrational fear of the hysterical set. In truth, the double-sized historic episode of this ABC sitcom doesn’t celebrate homosexuality, it celebrates lead character Ellen Morgan for at last being honest with herself and others about her sexual orientation. Period!

Well, no surprises. This volcano has been scheduled to blow for weeks. Yet even while anticlimactic--having been written and talked about almost ad nauseam--this is still a landmark. Make that a double landmark: not only the first prime-time series with an openly gay lead character, but also the first one whose gay protagonist is played by a performer who has gone public with her own homosexuality.

A sitcom that’s . . . important? Uh oh. Nothing on TV is usually more pathetic or pretentious than a comedy on a soapbox, one that has a thunderbolt epiphany and decides to take itself very seriously, temporarily stashing its one-liners, putting on a stone face and issuing a cosmic message to the globe: Thou shalt recycle.

But “Ellen” is much too wise to preach. It keeps its priorities straight tonight, remembering that it’s a comedy first, a landmark second.

In case you’ve been on Jupiter and out of range of ABC’s promotional din, here’s the word: The episode has Ellen, an unmarried, unattached, unfulfilled book store manager played by Ellen DeGeneres, tiptoeing out of the closet inch by inch as a lesbian, just as DeGeneres herself publicly crept out recently, putting a bold exclamation point on her revelation in an interview Friday with Diane Sawyer on ABC’s “20/20.”

“Ellen” began this voyage at the beginning of the season, hemorrhaging broad hints about its lead character’s sexual orientation like the Exxon Valdez pouring oil. Yet although the timing for the grand coming out is definitely meant to be Nielsen-friendly, lifting the curtain on her TV character and herself is a risky Act 1 for which DeGeneres and Disney-owned ABC deserve praise instead of cynicism. Whether an Act 2 is ahead surely will be influenced by the size of her TV audience for the brief remainder of her fifth season.

It remains to be seen whether ABC extends the moderately popular “Ellen,” averaging 13.7 million viewers a week (compared to 30 million a week for ratings leaders “ER” and “Seinfeld”), beyond this season. But the Two-Ellens-Are-Gay theme is one the network appears anxious to stretch like spandex across a portion of this crucial ratings sweeps month.

In an especially emotional moment during that much-watched “20/20” interview with Sawyer, DeGeneres reported that her father and his wife had banished her from home after she told them she was lesbian. The network tie-in with that follows tonight’s “Ellen,” when DeGeneres’ parents chat with Sawyer on “PrimeTime Live.” If this odyssey travels any further, it will be the season’s longest-running miniseries.

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And on her talk show today, Oprah Winfrey--who plays Ellen’s therapist in tonight’s star-stacked episode--is scheduled to air an interview with DeGeneres and her companion, Anne Heche, a promising young actress with a prominent role in “Volcano.” Lesbian love is nothing new for daytime TV, even though lesbians who surface on raunchier shows than Winfrey’s are generally socially dysfunctional or goose-stepping Nazi hookers in mini-skirts who belong in closets.

If calmer, saner discourse with Oprah can convert some homophobes, that’s welcome, for up there on Jupiter you also may have missed the latest blast of anti-gay bigotry from that great wit, the Rev. Jerry Falwell. He was probably wearing his usual frozen smile when he delivered that infantile slur, titling DeGeneres “Ellen DeGenerate.”

And speaking of smiling, tonight’s “Ellen” is not only very much a positive milestone--extending TV’s red carpet a bit further from the center--but also very smart, very funny and, at times, very inspired. Get ready to guffaw often, and to experience some poignancy and a bit of heartbreak.

It begins with Ellen getting reacquainted with an old college chum who is now a TV reporter. Although he clumsily comes on to her, it’s his tall, good-looking, gay producer, Susan, played by Laura Dern, whom Ellen fancies, an admission she makes to herself and Susan reluctantly, painfully, hilariously and, of course, neurotically.

After living a life of gay denial into her mid-30s, Ellen reveals her true self to her sage, understanding shrink, Oprah: “There are a lot of people out there who think people like me are sick.” Will they include Ellen’s dearest pals, who presumably think she’s straight? The answer comes wittily in tonight’s second half hour.

Meanwhile, it’s Ellen’s parents who are stunned next week when informed by her that she is lesbian. And in the following week’s season finale, she tells her boss.

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It’s been a quarter of a century from one gay landmark to another. ABC’s 1972 movie “That Certain Summer” began TV’s slow, lumbering assent toward enlightenment with a seminal Richard Levinson and William Link script about a stereotype-breaking, masculine divorce who struggles to tell his 13-year-old son that he is gay.

Today, movies with gay story lines are no longer weird night-creepers of the airwaves, gay supporting characters proliferate in series, and viewers even see the occasional homosexual kiss, albeit an encounter usually self-consciously sterile compared with heterosexual romance. On “Ellen,” DeGeneres and Dern hug warmly like a couple of siblings.

Gay drifts are now increasingly evident in other comedies, from an April episode of NBC’s “Suddenly Susan” to panicked Homer’s homophobia in a recent episode of “The Simpsons” on Fox to that network’s “Married . . . With Children,” where openly gay Amanda Bearse played her straight character’s lesbian cousin on Monday.

Meanwhile, lesbians are an ever-warmer if not quite sizzling item in mainstream theatrical films, from the erotic “Bound” to now-running “Chasing Amy.” So why, in some quarters, is there still angst-chasing over relatively benign “Ellen”? An optimistic scenario is that we’re hearing the noisy cracking of decadent old skittishness, glacial ignorance melting under the sunny warmth of illumination.

Although Ellen Morgan tonight ponders the meaning of normalcy without offering any facile answers, one leaves the hour empathizing with her search for completeness and knowing that nothing about her is aberrant except her crummy wardrobe. That normalcy message alone will freak out the sanctimonious Jerry Falwells who are terrified at the prospect of gays being thought of as mainstream.

In any case, let’s hear some cheers for “Ellen.” A series able to treat such a volatile topic with equal parts humor and sensitivity is one that prime time can’t afford to lose.

* “Ellen” airs at 9 tonight on ABC (Channel 7). “PrimeTime Live” follows at 10 p.m. “The Oprah Winfrey Show” airs at 3 p.m. on KABC-TV Channel 7. The network has rated the “Ellen” episode TV-14 (may not be suitable for children under the age of 14).

* THE REACTION

For many urban gays, this show is a big yawn and a cynical one at that. E1