In an interview with Ad Week,
daytime talk show host Ellen DeGeneres said that she received several
threats after she came out gay in 1997, including a bomb threat.
“When I came out, I had death threats
and there was a bomb threat, but they misjudged the time of the
taping,” DeGeneres
told the outlet. “We had already finished, and thank God.”
In 1997, DeGeneres came out gay on the
cover of Time magazine, coinciding with the coming out of the
character she played on her ABC sitcom Ellen,
the first openly lesbian character on network television. ABC
canceled Ellen the
following year. CBS canceled DeGeneres' The Ellen Show
after airing only 8 episodes of the sitcom.
DeGeneres said that
she never thought her show would be canceled over her coming out.
“I knew there
would be people that didn’t like it, but I didn’t realize my show
would be canceled,” she said. “I just thought, ‘It’s going to
be interesting.'”
“The last season
we did was a great season, and unfortunately nobody saw it because it
was not advertised. It was purposely not advertised by ABC and Disney
because they just wanted to hold their hands up to advertisers and
say we’re not promoting it, we’re not doing this. And I get it.
It’s a business, and I understand that. And so everybody had their
reasons, and unfortunately, I was just blindsided,” she added.