There was good reason for my paranoia. A paparazzo had found out that I was gay and made it her mission to out me. She stalked me. She waited for me every day in front of my building and followed me everywhere, occasionally making eye contact with me and signing to me that she was watching me; that she knew who I was. I had been photographed by paparazzi before, even followed, but this felt like being a deer in a hunter’s scope. She and her driver were very aggressive and quite scary. The fear and paranoia led to my relationship’s demise as it was impossible for me to leave the house with my girlfriend without feeling intensely anxious and uncomfortable. Not only was I terrified of being exposed as gay, I was scared of being photographed because of what I looked like. I had gained 70 pounds since my last encounter with paparazzi when they were covering stories about anorexic actresses. I didn’t want to be in a magazine for being a fat actress.
I met Ellen in 2001 when I weighed 168 pounds. I don’t know if I was that weight exactly, but I was heavy enough that the thought that she might have found me attractive or that we could have been a couple never entered my mind. I remember being so excited and overjoyed to be around her that I can still recall the feeling of running after her backstage at a concert we were both attending for Rock the Vote. I caught up to her, sat next to her at a table, and bought her a drink. I remember what she wore: an orange knit sweater, white T-shirt, blue jeans, and white tennis shoes. I remember what we talked about and a joke she made as we were looking down at the mosh pit. I embarrassed myself by laughing too much and too loudly at that joke, but I simply couldn’t stop. I thought she was the most amazing person I’d ever met. She was highly intelligent, sharply observant, and funny. She was so beautiful it seemed that light emanated from her bright blue eyes. I had the best night of my life. I felt good about myself around her. I was excited and yet comfortable. At the end of the night, she invited me to come over to her house with the group of friends she’d met up with at the concert. I didn’t go. As we’d just met, I thought she was just inviting me to be polite, and I was too shy, too fat, and too insecure to go to her house with her friends. I felt that I had created the perfect memory of being around her that night and I didn’t want to ruin it. As it turns out, she had invited those people over only so she would have the excuse of a party to invite me to so she could get to know me better. She was attracted to me. She was attracted to me as a 168-pound woman with a face like a pie. The fact that she got stuck entertaining a whole bunch of people at her house that night because of me is still something we laugh about.
Despite the obvious chemistry at that show in March 2001, Ellen and I didn’t reconnect and become a couple until December 2004. Other than the fact that I was overweight, I was also closeted and private about my homosexuality, and so the thought of being with the most famous lesbian in the world didn’t cross my mind at that point. I continued working on Ally McBeal and taking small steps toward living my life as a gay woman. I had met some lesbians through the girl I’d briefly dated, and I spent time with them, observing them and trying to figure out what it meant to be gay. I soon discovered that I had to figure out what kind of lesbian I was going to be. It was obvious to me almost immediately that I was very different from most other girls. I didn’t really fit into either role of “butch” or “femme.” I liked wearing makeup and dresses and heels, but I also liked to wear engineer’s boots and black tank tops. In the first few months of my coming out to other lesbians, I realized that I was as much a misfit in the gay world as I was in society at large. I was half butch, half femme, neither here nor there. At that point in my life, I didn’t understand that playing roles in any relationship is false and will inevitably lead to the relationship’s collapse. No one can be any one thing all the time. There is a great deal of lying done while a role is being played in any relationship, homosexual or heterosexual. As I had tried to fit into the sample size clothing, I also tried to fit into a preconceived idea of what it meant to be gay. And any time I try to fit into a mold made by someone else, whether that means sample size clothing or a strict label of “butch” or “femme,” I lose myself.
I was a misfit in the lesbian world, I was closeted and scared that I would be outed in the media, so I reverted to being alone. I was still heavy, probably around 150, when 9/11 happened. 9/11 changed my life. I was so deeply disturbed by the realization that I could die without living my life openly and happily that I reached out to a friend who’d wanted me to meet a girl she knew and went on my first date with Francesca. We instantly began a serious and happy relationship that lasted three years. As 9/11 had jolted me into living my life more honestly and fully, my life improved greatly. Although I still struggled with self-acceptance, Francesca was loving and patient and taught me how to be in a relationship. I sold my apartment, and Francesca and I bought a beautiful house in Los Feliz.
When Ally McBeal ended, I landed a role in an innovative and exciting new show, Arrested Development. I decided to tell my producers and co-stars on Arrested Development that I was gay, as I felt that I couldn’t be in a serious relationship and hide it from the people I worked with. I felt that trying to do so was very disrespectful to Francesca, even though I was mostly terrified to introduce her as my girlfriend, especially to the show’s executive producers, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. I was truly afraid I could lose my job. But it suddenly seemed pointless to have a girlfriend if I was going to hide her from the rest of my life. Hiding her from the rest of the world was a different story, however.
The paparazzo who had begun stalking me around the time I was beginning to date accomplished her mission to out me when she got photographs of Francesca and me making up after an argument in an alley off Melrose. I had pulled Francesca into the alley after our conversation got a little heated because I didn’t want to make a scene and inadvertently out myself to the people walking by on the sidewalk who would surely recognize a couple having an argument. Instead, the photographs went around the world and outed me to everyone who stood in a supermarket checkout line. Because of these photos, I was forced to come out to my aunts and uncles and cousins in Australia before the tabloid hit the stands and hit them over the head with shock. The shock for me was the amount of love and acceptance I received from my extended family, especially my aunt Joan and uncle Stan.
I will be eternally grateful to that paparazzo who I had feared would ruin my life, since she forced me to be honest with my family about being gay. She freed me from a prison in which I had held myself captive my whole life. At my mother’s urging, however, I agreed to continue to keep the truth of my sexuality from my grandmother and so began a practice of removing all articles about me from my grandmother’s favorite tabloids, something that we continued doing for years. When I finally told my grandmother that I was gay, her reaction was truly amazing. I was back home in Australia to celebrate her hundredth birthday, about a year after Ellen and I had become a couple. My mother and I decided it would be my mother’s responsibility to tell Gran that I was gay, since she was going to have to deal with the aftermath if Gran was unhappy about it, which we were almost certain she would be. After Ellen came out on her television show in 1997, Gran stopped watching it, saying that Ellen was “disgusting.” My mother, having come to LA for a visit with Ellen and me, was supposed to show Gran pictures of the two of us together: our house and our animals—our life. My mother told me that Gran took the news calmly. But to everyone’s surprise, when I sat in front of Gran to yell my hello, she asked me in a yell if I was dating. I yelled at her, “Gran, I’m with Ellen.”