That’s all well and good but (and I know I sound like a cynical asshole for suggesting this) what does Meredith Baxter now have going on career-wise? She doesn’t have to fear much of a homophobic backlash since she’s at the stage of her career where she’s mostly cashing residuals from “Family Ties”. If she had done this 20 (or even 15) years ago, that would 've been gutsy.
It’s not fair! It’s not fair!
Oh, wait, that was Burgess Meredith.
And yet I suspect that anyone suggesting that “homosexuality is a choice” will still be quickly tarred and feathered around here.
So she contracted the gay from her contractor? I thought it had something to do with fixing houses.
Living a lie means the denial is very shallow, not deep.
Lots of people come out late in life. Probably she isn’t strictly lesbian but somewhere close to bisexual. Or it’s possible social conditioning is such that it didn’t even occur to her that the idea of gayness could apply to herself, until very late she thought about it and had that ‘aha’ moment. It’s amazing the things that might never occur to you until they are pointed out by someone, and then they suddenly become obvious.
Not the same thing at all. :rolleyes:
She said that she had an affair with a woman prior to her third and last marriage to a man. So there were clearly inklings, but she wasn’t in a place where she could accept her truth. Kelly McGillis tells a similar story, she went through two failed marriages and affairs with both men and women before and after before she was able to look at herself in the mirror and say “I’m a lesbian.”
I’m really bothered that this is yet another gossip blog outing. I mean, of all people for Perez Hilton to feel it necessary to push out of a glass closet (Baxter wasn’t exactly hiding her relationship, after all) why her and why now? Cheap and tacky, Perez, but then, that’s him in a nutshell.
Not much more than a wag of the finger.
Who gives a shit?? Seriously. Pit thread below.
I think Alex P. Keaton would have gone into spasms over this.
Well, yeah, I was gonna say…
I totally don’t get the ‘Bridget Loves Bridget’ thing.
Early in her career, Meredith Baxter was in a sitcom called Bridget Loves Bernie, with her first husband, David Birney. It was about an uptown Irish-American woman who married a Jewish cab driver. It was based on the 1920s play Abie’s Irish Rose.
On a whim last night, I plugged Meredith Baxter’s name into the youtube search engine, and got this clip. Remember the show “Family” from about ten years before “Family Ties”? Anyway, when taken out of context and in light of recent revelations, the dialogue from this scene seems to have a funny subtext.
Link.
Gotcha, thanks. I knew everything in your post except the name of the sitcom, which is sort of the keystone to the whole thing.
Meredith sure was pretty.
Gary Goldberg, the producer of “Family Ties” commented last year on “where is Alex now?”, when he speculated about who Alex would have voted for:
I see what you did there.
FTR, if you re-read my first post, you will notice that I did NOT make any mention of Alex Keaton being a republican, but a conservative. Yes I am well aware that there are as many democratic homophobes as there are gay republicans, but conservatives in general have made a very specific point of demonizing homosexuality.
And also, there were numerous episodes of “Family Ties” built around the premise that Alex believed a woman’s place was in the home raising the kids and cooking in the kitchen. One episode in particular had Alex and his mother Elyse (Baxter) taking a small-engine repair class together - Alex became infuriated that his mother excelled at the class,while he floundered. I think the notion that, if Alex’s mother had come out as a lesbian (as the RL actress has) and had a g.f. who was a general contractor, the g.f.'s occupation would upset him more than his mother’s sexuality. He’d be bothered by a woman doing a manly job that he would likely not be good at.
Should actually be “Bridget Loves Bernadette.”
Are you talking about the Alex Keaton of the 1980s, or how Alex might think of it today? People’s opinions do evolve over time, especially when an issue involves a family member.