Meredith Baxter: The Advocate interview

Meredith Baxter has been giving several “coming out” interviews but I am just so impressed with her talk with The Advocate. She is so refreshingly open and candid that I wanted to share a few chunks of it with you.

When did you realize you were gay?
Thirteen years ago I had a short-term affair with somebody — a woman — who I just cared for tremendously as a person, [I] was not really attracted to her, but the best way to describe it, [a romance] seemed like the next natural step in our relationship just because I cared about her a lot. Not once — it’s probably hard to imagine — but not once did it occur to me that I was a lesbian. Not once. I just thought, OK, I don’t think so, and went off and got married again for a short period of time. And a couple years after that, I entered my next foray into being with a woman, and the penny dropped at that point.

How was the process of coming out to your grown children?
Oh, a piece of cake. They were cool. All the kids were basically grown — the youngest [twins] were 17 at the time — and everyone was great. They basically just said, “We just want you to be happy.” So I really could not have asked for a better process than that.

In your personal life with the people you’ve told, has it been a cakewalk?
Maybe a cakewalk on their side. It was absolute fucking agony for me, only in the respect that I was so fearful.

When a celebrity comes out, there is a tendency among some gay people to try to make that person a poster child for activism or hold them up as a spokesperson. Is that a role you’re willing to step into, or is it something you haven’t begun to think about?
Well, two things come to mind. First of all, if they were to look for a spokesperson, you’d think they’d look for someone with a bigger track record behind them. …  But the truth is that coming out is a political act these days because it has so many ramifications. I do a lot of speaking engagements and I have my little skin care company, so I go to trade shows and I interact with the public quite frequently. I haven’t been on prime time in many years on a regular basis, so when I’ve gone out into the Midwest or down in Florida or Louisiana, I was really surprised by the extent of attention I got by people who knew me immediately, who responded to me so beautifully and with a great deal of affection. It surprised me.

The message I get is that I’m America’s mom. And because research seems to show that people who have someone who is gay in their family — or a friend or just know someone in the community who is gay — they seem to have a more open attitude about gay and lesbian issues. So I can say I’m still that mom. I am still the same person. I’m nonthreatening, I’m very friendly, I’m accessible, and if they can say, “OK, well, she’s a lesbian, maybe that’s not such a scary thing. And if she can come out and say that without too much fear, then maybe I can do that.” If it makes a difference to a couple of people, then I guess it’s worthwhile. I certainly got tired of hiding to the extent that I was.

You have been so open about battling breast cancer and becoming sober. Is this also part of a trajectory of living an open and honest life?
As part of the sober program, it does say that we are as sick as our secrets. I’m not interested in making my life an open book, but I don’t like to pretend that things are different than they are. That’s important to me.

Do you think getting sober helped you to really see that you might be gay?
I don’t know that for sure, but I will tell you, I have been sober for a little over 19 years, and for the first 10 years of my sobriety I did very little work at self-examination, which is why I had to go get married again. I had to learn a lot about what my part was in all the things that happened in my life. For a long time I sort clung to the victim attitude, that “Gee, look at the sorry hand I’ve been dealt.” It’s a sad way to go through life, but it was what I was doing. And when I got out of that last marriage, I had kind of a breakdown. I started therapy and really recommitted myself to the program and started doing the work that I dragged my feet about earlier. It wasn’t long after that, that my mother died. I don’t think that was a small contribution to the awakening, to laying of groundwork for waking up. My youngest kids went off to college, so I wasn’t worried about the judgment and I wasn’t responsible for someone on a daily basis. I was sober and in a good place and open, so the timing was just very fruitful.