She’s Out, but Going Where?

No one said homesteading prime time for gays was going to be easy. Ellen DeGeneres knew that.

The last season of “Ellen” wasn’t even over before people wondered, what next? Would Ellen Morgan get a girlfriend? If so, would she kiss that girlfriend? And what would Disney-owned ABC do with a potentially gay-themed sitcom on its hands?

This is untrodden territory. Rough, uneven ground.

“I’m really excited that we’re doing something nobody is doing, but it is a fight,” said DeGeneres, whose show begins its fifth season tonight at 9:30.

“These are large corporations, and unfortunately I don’t know if the dog wags the tail, or the tail wags the dog. It’s advertisers who seem to control a lot of what goes on, and it scares the people who are in charge of making these decisions. So, as much as I am excited, I do get frustrated.”

The source of her frustration was illustrated last week when some questions--or eyebrows, anyway--were raised in ABC’s broadcast standards and practices department over an upcoming episode in which DeGeneres kisses another woman.

It’s actually the combination of the kiss and a certain line of dialogue (a joke that DeGeneres doesn’t want to give away) that rankled ABC’s in-house censors. They asked the producers to film another option.

“It’s literally a two-second kiss. I asked an editor to time it so I would know what I’m talking about here,” she said. “It’s a kiss like you would kiss a friend or your mother. It’s two women kissing on the lips--but it’s a two-second kiss. First of all, it’s been done before. I’m not breaking any new ground--there have been kisses on television. And, it’s just so nothing. It was so offensive to me that they’re saying you can’t show that.”

The issue isn’t entirely settled. Sources at ABC indicated that the kiss will make it onto the air in October, but the editing of the scene has not yet been finalized.

Still, it’s skirmishes like these that exasperate DeGeneres, who indicated last May that she’d happily have ended the series at the conclusion of last season. In those highly publicized final three episodes, her character, Ellen Morgan, realized she was a lesbian and told her family and friends. The one-hour coming-out episode won the show an Emmy for comedy writing.

“I have to appreciate how supportive [ABC] has been in doing it in the first place--but that was my fear of coming back and having to fight these battles every week. Especially when this is what I’m trying to say: ‘Who I am is OK,’ ” said DeGeneres, 39, who made her own lesbianism public at the same time as her character’s. “It’s hurtful to me because it’s basically pushing me back in the closet and saying, ‘We don’t want to know that you’re a sexual being.’ ”

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Ellen Morgan, who spent four seasons barking up the wrong tree, seems determined to get a love life in the early episodes of this season. First, though, she has to struggle with her feelings for an old boyfriend in tonight’s episode. Next week she is smitten by an attractive exercise instructor who invites her rock climbing, also with near-disastrous results.

But, as the kiss would indicate, things start looking up after that. Actress Lisa Darr will join the cast for at least four episodes as Ellen’s girlfriend.

DeGeneres said she’d like to explore that relationship on the show--sort of in the way “Mad About You” draws its humor from the reality of what a couple goes through. “But I don’t really think they would allow that kind of a show,” she said. “Because of that, we may not be able to keep a girlfriend.”

DeGeneres spent a lot of this summer in Hawaii, where her own girlfriend, actress Anne Heche, was filming the romantic comedy “6 Days, 7 Nights.” But she kept in close touch with the writers--many of whom are new to her show this season--as they wrote the early episodes.

“The main thing I didn’t want to do is go backward. Before the big coming-out episode, my character was very childlike and silly,” she said. “I wanted to not drastically change the character, but grow up a little bit. . . . I wanted to have smarter, conversational humor.”

DeGeneres knew she was gay years before making her public announcement five months ago. Has being America’s best-known lesbian changed her life?

“It made me more gay. I am now so gay it’s ridiculous,” she said in her typically deadpan comedy style. “I’m joking about that, but that’s what everybody knows about me now.”

It worries her some, that she and her TV character are becoming fused in people’s minds. She’s not worried about being gay--but about being only gay. For instance, a photo of her at the premiere of “G.I. Jane” was captioned in Entertainment Weekly, “Speaking of gays in the military. . . .”

“I struggle with what I’ve done and knowing it’s a good thing, and at the same time wishing my life could just be focused on what got me here in the first place, which is my work.”

That’s one of the reasons DeGeneres would like to see this be the last season of “Ellen.”

“I don’t know how much further we can go with this show, and 25 episodes is a lot to try to do all these compromises and still make it funny and creative and about something totally unique. If we have to keep going back to the middle, then we’re not doing anything different after all.”

But when things get difficult, DeGeneres’ mother sifts through the thousands of letters that the comedian has received in the last few months. Then she passes a few on to her daughter--like one from a 76-year-old lesbian who couldn’t believe “Ellen” made it to TV in her lifetime. That helps remind DeGeneres why she’s still doing this show.

How it will all turn out--for DeGeneres’ career, for Ellen’s love life, for the future of television--no one will know until the season’s end.

“If we don’t reach the [ratings] numbers that I need to reach, then I have to admit that the world is not quite ready to accept this,” she said. “I know I’m doing a good thing for a few people, but that doesn’t keep you on television.”