Is ‘Ellen’ an Opportunity --or Just Opportunistic?

Brian Garrido is rolling his eyes at his partner, David Marsh, as they sit over morning coffee in a Silver Lake cafe. They are talking about tonight’s Big Event--the debut of Ellen Morgan as television’s first openly gay lead character--and whether it really is a Big Event.

Garrido, 30, says no way. Marsh, 46, says emphatically yes, a reflection of differences in the age and tastes of these two gay men, but also of how variously this much-promoted moment in TV history is being received.

Comedian Ellen DeGeneres’ decision to come out as a lesbian and have her TV sitcom character do the same is a cultural landmark to some, a landmark in hype to others. While gay organizations stage celebratory parties for tonight’s episode of “Ellen” and anti-gay crusaders condemn it as another flush of the cultural toilet, Garrido doesn’t see much to get excited about.

He will watch the show with Marsh but would rather be doing any number of other things. “I kind of resent the way it’s being handled,” says Garrido, who has seen “Ellen” only a few times and considers DeGeneres, 39, a “one-dimensional” performer.

“Basically it comes down to money,” he says of her coming out on a show with so-so ratings. “It has nothing really to do with honesty. It has to do with being a celebrity, it has to do with Hollywood PR and it has to do with the media.”

He works in public relations, for a nonprofit film organization, and so congratulates DeGeneres on her ability to get publicity. “It’s been orchestrated really, really well. For her to get on the cover of Time magazine is amazing.”

But as someone who grew up on transvestite entertainer RuPaul and has been open about his homosexuality since he was 19, Garrido is not impressed with DeGeneres’ coming out schedule, either personally or as a TV character.

“She took two or three [seasons] to even come to some sort of sexual persona. That’s a subtle message, saying you still have to be in the closet . . . until you’ve reached that safety net. But a lot of us don’t have that choice or that option.”

Indeed, Garrido finds far more to cheer in the fact that 27-year-old Anne Heche, a rising actress with a starring role in the movie “Volcano,” identifies herself as DeGeneres’ girlfriend in the new issue of People magazine, making the pair Hollywood’s first openly gay star couple. “I applaud her. That shows real courage before her career kicks off,” Garrido says of Heche.

Marsh, a fan of “Ellen” who has also been out since he was in his early 20s, doesn’t care that DeGeneres has taken her time going public. “The character of Ellen Morgan, if you scratch beneath the surface . . . seemed like a lesbian. To embrace it and to acknowledge it, I thought was brave on her part.”

Moreover, he says, that embrace is of genuine significance in the social landscape, especially since viewers have a long-standing relationship with DeGeneres and her character.

“It has an impact I think in terms of, here’s a woman who’s very friendly, funny, not threatening at all. And suddenly she’s a lesbian as well. They have a face to attach to it and a face that up to now, if they thought about it at all, well, she looks completely normal.”

Marsh, who also works for a nonprofit film organization, considers television safe, antiseptic and controlled, a mass medium that routinely ignores large segments of the masses: Latinos, Asians and, for the most part, homosexuals. In that context, he suggests, making Ellen Morgan a lesbian is “pretty radical.”

Though close to Garrido’s age, Wanda Alarcon, a 29-year-old lesbian and Los Angeles graduate student, agrees with Marsh.

“I’m very happy she’s doing what she’s doing. I’m really looking forward to it,” Alarcon says of tonight’s episode. “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t think it’s a big deal.

“Even though she’s not taking a very political stance, it’s still going to translate into something very new with the mainstream audience,” Alarcon adds, alluding to criticism by some gay activists that DeGeneres has not shown much political sophistication in her recent comments.

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And what does the general audience think?

“Who cares?” shrugged April Lewis, a 26-year-old homemaker from Chino, as she and several friends peered at the celebrity footprints at Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood this week.

Another member of her group, Katie Pratt, a 21-year-old student from Chino, does. She said she believes that homosexuality is immoral and that television should not be developing story lines about it. Still, she enjoys “Ellen” and plans to keep watching it, lesbian plot twists notwithstanding.

That’s not the case for Tricia Zeller, 24, up from Costa Mesa with her boyfriend.

“I liked it before I found all that out. That kind of turned me off,” she allowed, adding that she will probably tune “Ellen” out now. “I think it sends a message to people that the lifestyle is OK. It kind of glorifies it.”

By 3 to 1, the public says having a gay lead in a prime-time show is a bad idea (37%), rather than a good idea (11%), although most (46%) say it depends on how the issue is handled, according to a poll for TV Guide.

Indeed, Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, a professor at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication who studies the effects of mass media, thinks the show may simply underscore social divisiveness over gay issues.

“Maybe it will make lesbianism a little bit more normal,” she says. “Then again, since you have a lot of people who are organized to object to the gay community, who see it as the whole threat to family, it kind of refocuses the same division we already have in public discourse.”

The general emergence of gay characters on TV in the last several years--there are now some two dozen--is of greater note then the “Ellen” show, Ball-Rokeach says. “Really, it’s more glitz than it is social significance” she says of Ellen’s coming out. “The media are creating it and the media are promoting it.”

Even with an increasing number of gay characters on the TV screen, Ball-Rokeach says the notion that TV is legitimizing homosexuality is exaggerated. “I think the normalization effects usually are overdrawn. People claim ‘Oh, my goodness, TV is promoting this.’ But it’s still such a minuscule part of television.”

* HOWARD ROSENBERG

“Ellen” keeps its priorities in order: comedy first, landmark second. F1