She's an LGBTQ pioneer and a TV icon. This is Ellen DeGeneres's story — from personal childhood trauma to receiving one of the nation’s highest honors.
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00:00I tear everything I say apart. Everything I do, I just, I analyze and my mind kind of holds on to
00:07oh I said this or did this or um so but then there's a part of me that you know
00:13is pretty okay and confident.
00:30I didn't want to tell my mother because I was protecting her and I knew that that would ruin her happiness.
01:00My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was 60.
01:10She's 97 today and we don't know where the hell she is.
01:22Susan, I'm gay.
01:34When everything came crashing to a halt three months or so after she came out um it was just
01:41a very clear very strong message sent by the tv industry that it wasn't going to tolerate gay people.
01:51I was on the road doing stand-up trying to have a career again because I had lost my sitcom and I
02:08had nothing going on and he called me and said I wrote this thing I have you in mind and you ramble
02:15and that's what you do in your work and so you know I just got really lucky.
02:27You got a problem buddy? Huh? Huh? Do you? Do you? Do you?
02:36This is our very very first show and you are my very first audience.
02:46I think that my entire career has been an adventure and it's a ride that I never could
02:54have predicted. I never would have expected it to go in in the places that it's gone and
03:02it's easy to forget now just how much courage was required for Ellen to come out on the most
03:21public of stages almost 20 years ago. Just how important it was not just to the LGBT community
03:29but for all of us to see somebody so full of kindness and light somebody we liked so much
03:35somebody who could be our neighbor or our colleague or our sister challenge our own assumptions.