Caitlyn Jenner says Ellen ‘alienated’ her from LGBT+ community
By Ross Semple
Caitlyn Jenner has accused Ellen Degeneres of “alienating” her from the LGBT+ community.
In her memoir The Secrets of My Life, Caitlyn accuses Ellen of taking her comments about marriage equality “out of context”. In a 2015 appearance on Degeneres’ talk show Ellen, Jenner discussed her feelings on equal marriage.
“I have to admit that I remember 15 years ago, 20 years ago, whenever it was that the whole gay marriage issue came up, I was not for it. I am a traditionalist,” Jenner said at the time.
However, she went on to say that her feelings had softened: “I don’t ever want to stand in front of anyone’s happiness. If that word ‘marriage’ is really really that important to you, I can go with it.”
Ellen later pressed Caitlyn on the issues, telling Jenner that she seemed “not on board with it”.
Degeneres later called Jenner’s view on marriage “confusing” during an interview on The Howard Stern Show.
Now, in her book, Caitlyn says that Ellen’s actions “further alienated me from members of the LGBTQ community.”
She writes: “Ellen’s appearance on The Howard Stern Show, where in my mind she even more emphatically took what I said out of context, made it go viral.”
Meanwhile, TIME magazine recently commemorated 20 years since Ellen Degeneres came out.
The magazine has reprinted the interview from their April 14, 1997 edition on their website to mark the anniversary. It makes for interesting reading, especially when you consider all that Ellen has accomplished in the last two decades.
During the interview, when asked outright about her sexuality, Ellen replied with a simple “Yes”. “I knew that I was going to—that was one of the things when I decided to have my character on the show come out, I knew I was going to have to come out too.
But I didn’t want to talk about it until the show was done,” she revealed at the time.
Watch the initial exchange between Ellen and Caitlyn on Ellen below: