Lily Tomlin remembers being offered a “Yep, I’m Gay” TIME magazine cover decades before Ellen

At 73, the great Lily Tomlin is busier than ever with a new movie Admission (starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd) and the ABC sitcom Malibu Country with Reba McEntire.

It’s been more than 40 years since she made her splash on TV’s Laugh-In which she parlayed into a movie career with an Oscar-nominated performance in Nashville and such films as Nine to Five, The Incredible Shrinking Woman and All of Me.

What wasn’t known until more recent years – publicly at least – is that Tomlin her frequent professional collaborator Jane Wagner have been a solid couple for more than four decades.

Tomlin says in the new issue of Entertainment Weekly that she had an opportunity to come out publicly in much the same way Ellen DeGeneres was to do 212 years later.

“TIME magazine offered me the cover in 1975 if I would come out,” she says. “I was a bit insulted that they thought I’d trade my personal life for the cover of TIME. It’s probably just as well. Being such a big TV personality at that time, it probably would have been tsunami-like.”

She adds: “It’s stunning the progress in the last 15 years.”

In the end, Tomlin ended up getting a TIME cover anyway but for her professional accomplishments, not her personal life.