Life

Phil Donahue interviewed a gay man before Stonewall on TV & was an LGBTQ+ ally thereafter

"Through my activism, I began to realize what it must be like to be born, to live, and to die in the closet. I can't even imagine it.”
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Phil Donahue in 2005
Phil Donahue in 2005 Photo: Shutterstock

Following the death Phil Donahue over the weekend, LGBTQ+ fans are saluting the late journalist and talk show host for his pioneering coverage of gay rights and the AIDS epidemic on daytime TV.

On Monday, NBC’s Today first broke the news that the 88-year-old eight-time Daytime Emmy Award winner and 1980 Peabody Award recipient had died Sunday night following a long illness.

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“Her work has driven tremendous progress in our fight to give hate no safe harbor,” the White House said.

In addition to being a TV trailblazer, Donahue was also a longtime LGBTQ+ ally. As he told fellow talk show icon Oprah Winfrey in a 2002 interview, within a year of launching The Phil Donahue Show at Dayton, Ohio, TV station WLWD in late 1967, the host invited “a real, live homosexual” to be a guest on his show. That 1968 episode aired prior to the Stonewall uprising in the following year.

“I was terrified,” Donahue admitted to Winfrey. “I’m from Notre Dame. And believe me, the one thing you didn’t want to be doing at Notre Dame was hangin’ with gay people. Sure enough, during that show, the third caller said, ‘Birds of a feather….’ Then another caller said to the guest, ‘How does Phil look to you?’ The guy said, ‘That’s an irrelevant question.’”

“If you don’t understand those feelings, then you don’t understand homophobia,” Donahue continued. “There’s a reason for the closet. As the years went by after that show, I got involved in gay politics. And through my activism, I began to realize what it must be like to be born, to live, and to die in the closet. I can’t even imagine it.”

“Gayness is not a moral issue,” he added, “yet no institution on earth has promoted homophobia more than the church. That’s what’s so ironic about the scandal in the Catholic Church. Here you have the most homophobic institution in the world with the largest closet of homosexuals.”

A lifelong Catholic, that same year Donahue told The New York Times, “I will always be a Catholic. But I want my church to join the human race and finally walk away from this antisexual theology.”

After his show went into national syndication in 1970, Donahue continued to tackle LGBTQ+ topics, bringing them to a national daytime audience, in many cases likely for the first time.

As activist and author Mark Segal noted in 2019, Donahue would invite members of the Gay Liberation Front onto his show in the ’70s to argue for LGBTQ+ rights, and those debates would influence the American Psychological Association’s decision in 1973 to no longer classify homosexuality a mental disorder.

In 1982, as the scope of the AIDS crisis began to come into national view, Donahue’s show was the first to feature a guest living with the disease. The episode also featured author and activist Larry Kramer in a discussion about AIDS, its effects on the gay community, and the stigma faced by gay men with the disease.

Ten years later, former NFL player Roy Simmons chose Donahue’s show as the venue on which he would come out, making him the second professional footballer to come out publicly. That same year, Donahue hosted a debate between LGBTQ+ advocates and anti-gay politicians around a local California ballot referendum that prevented the LGBTQ+ community from being recognized as a protected minority group.

As GLAAD noted in a social media post about his death Monday, Donahue was also the host of the organization’s first-ever GLAAD Media Awards in 1990, where he received the GLAAD Media Person of the Year Award. The organization honored him again in 2009 with its Special Recognition Award.

“Donahue brought important visibility to the lives of LGBTQ people on his iconic talk show, and he remained an advocate for the LGBTQ community the rest of his life,” GLAAD wrote.

Donahue’s coverage of LGBTQ+ issues didn’t just move the needle on LGBTQ+ rights for his daytime audience. It also gave LGBTQ+ people themselves hope.

“In 1987, shortly after I told my grandmother I was gay (she was 84), she took me on a walk and explained that she watched the ‘Phil Donahue Show’ so she knew that I couldn’t change,” journalist Eric Marcus, founder and host of the Making Gay History podcast, wrote in a Monday X post. “It gave her comfort to know that Donahue was supportive.”

On Threads, drag performer Hedda Lettuce wrote that Donahue’s show “was my first exposure to gay community as a queer kid.”

It also gave her the tools she needed to fight back against bullies. “One day in math class, my primary bully was tormenting me and I must have heard someone say this on Donahue the day earlier, because I turned to him and responded, ‘The only reason you pick on me is because you’re insecure about your own sexuality.’”

“His eyes crossed and i felt vindicated. That did not stop him from bullying me, but it was still very satisfying. Thanks phil [sic].”

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