Lesbian : December 2007 Archives

Since the publication Wednesday of my Daily News column on Jodie Foster publicly acknowledging the woman who has long presumed to be her life partner, the story has spread like wildfire across the blogosphere. Some sites like AfterEllen.com, Popnography, Queerty and Towleroad.com have credited my piece and others have not. There's a part of me that wants credit for being the only journalist in the room to pick up on the significance of that part of her speech and to report on it. But then I think about what she did and how she did it, and all the credit goes to Jodie Foster for doing it her way.

I am against the outing of celebrities and would not intentionally do so. I think they should do it in their own time - always. I know from personal experience that it's a lot harder and complicated to live in the closet than out of it. But I had no problem writing the column because as a journalist, I wrote about what I saw and heard at the Women In Entertainment Breakfast where Jodie was being honored.,

She seemed so relaxed the entire morning, cheerfully doing interviews on the red carpet leading to the front steps of the Beverly Hills Hotel. I even chatted with her for a few minutes. Once inside, I was only two tables away and saw how Jodie got up from her seat and greeted her late-arriving mother and led her to her seat.
I was enjoying my scrambled eggs, looking around to see who was where, and thinking about how cool it was to be at the same table as Tilda Swinton and sitting right next to Natalie Zea of ABC's "Dirty Sexy Money."

We saw a film reel of Jodie's best work from early TV spots as a child to the Oscar nomination as a teenager in "Taxi Driver" to the Academy Award winning performances in "The Accused" and "The Silence of the Lambs" plus the big commercial hits like "Maverick," "Contact," "Panic Room" and "Flightplan."

Jodie began her speech and it was really good, a cut above the usual as she thanked her mother and the team of people who have been around her for as long as 30 years in some cases. Then she thanked "my beautiful Cydney who sticks with me through all the rotten and the bliss."

I did not know who Cydney was, honestly, and had to check various sources once I got back to the office to confirm that it was Jodie's longtime partner.

So I wrote up my column and was ready to turn it in then suddenly wondered, "Should I call Jodie's people and ask, 'Did she really mean to come out?' So I asked my editor, Ron Kaye, to read it. Ron shrugged his shoulders and wondered what the big deal was.

"You've written it like as if it was the most normal thing in the world to thank the person you love on an occasion like that," Ron said. "And, it is."