Chat show host Ellen DeGeneres says
she's been bullied her entire life for being gay.
The openly lesbian entertainer who
married her girlfriend, Australian actress Portia Lee James
DeGeneres, in 2008, appeared Wednesday on CNN's Anderson Cooper
360 to discuss the recent string of gay teens who committed
suicide after being bullied.
“When these things happen, it feels
like a direct assault on me, because I am that person that they are
bullying,” DeGeneres told Anderson Cooper. “I am that person
that – that feels like committing suicide. They're talking about
me. I'm gay, and I have been ostracized my whole life and in
society. And I'm sent that message on a daily basis by the media,
and – and it hurts.” (The video is embedded in the right panel
of this page.)
The fifty-two-year-old host of the
popular daytime talk show The Ellen DeGeneres Show came out
gay in 1997 on the cover of Time. She married her girlfriend
in 2008 after a four-year romance.
“I want to say to those kids out
there: I have been through it,” she added. “I came out. I am
successful. I am happy. I am in love, and there is hope.”