Ellen has Portia visit her show and quietly subverts America

If you missed the last two episodes of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, you also missed a quiet revolution in how gay lesbian relationships are being presented to America. Ellen and Portia have been married for seven months now and Portia has a new show launching on ABC Wednesday called Better Off Ted (it's quite funny IMHO). Naturally, that means she is doing the talk show circuit and naturally that means dropping by Ellen. 

It's been said in the past that Ellen kept her "gayness" hidden on her show, but those days are long gone as these two clips clearly demonstrate. In them, Ellen calls Portia her wife, repeatedly discusses their marriage, acts silly, shows wedding photos and even plays The Newlywed Game with a straight couple from the audience.

Pretty amazing, no? Millions and millions of average Americans watched those clips and in the process were steadily desensitized to the issue of gay marriage by seeing how utterly normal gay couples are. Actually, let's make that lesbian couples. As fantastic as Ellen is, I think gay men need this same kind of visibility and find it ironic that while we have so much more visibility when it comes to television characters than do our lesbian counterparts, we lag so far behind when it comes to real people such as Ellen, Rosie O'Donnell, Suze Orman andRachel Maddow. And that's important because, frankly, Americans are so much more frightened of gay male sexuality than they are lesbian.

Here's hoping someday Neil Patrick Harris gets his own talkshow and invites David Burtka on to discuss their getting married! 

BTW, don't you love that eHarmony is the sponsor for that episode of Ellen?