22 November 2016, Washington DC, USA
Ellen has a way of making you laugh about some thing rather than at someone.
Except when I danced on her show, she laughed at me.
It’s easy to forget now, when we’ve come so far, where now marriage is equal under the law, just how much courage was required for Ellen to come out on the most public of stages almost 20 years ago. Just how important it was not just for the LGBT community, but for all us to see somebody so full of kindness and light. Somebody we liked so much, somebody who could be our neighbor or our colleague or our sister challenge our own assumptions. Remind us that we have more in common than we realize, push our country in the direction of justice. What an incredible burden it was to bear, to risk your career like that. People don’t do that very often.
But it's like Ellen says, 'we all want a tortilla chip that can support the weight of guacamole'. Which really makes no sense to me. But I thought I would break the mood, because I was getting choked up.
And she did pay a price. We don’t remember this, I hadn’t remembered it. She did, for a pretty long stretch of time–even in Hollywood,
And yet today, every day in every way Ellen counters what too often divides us with the countless things that bind us together and inspires us to be better, one joke, one dance at a time.