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Remembering Anne Heche: Defiant and Overlooked Hero?

Anne Heche gets little credit as a pioneer, but upon her death, Rebecca Johnson reflects that her brave stand may have helped change the world.

Twenty years ago, I arrived at Anne Heche’s apartment in L.A. to interview her for Vogue. Back then, the magazine would theme issues—shape, power, etc. as a way to justify profiling women for no particular reason. Heche was pregnant at the time with her son, Homer, so…Shape!

Vogue is nothing if not hagiographic so I churned out the requisite copy. We sat on the  living room floor in her surprisingly modest apartment, going through a gift box filled with children’s clothing—everything yellow because she didn’t yet know (or want to know) the gender of the child. She seemed very glowy in the apricot light of a Southern California afternoon—porcelain skin, blonde hair, elfin features.

I was thinking, you took a principled stand and expected what? To change society overnight?

Still, I couldn’t decide if she was a beauty or not. Heche was sexy but androgynous with a slightly feral edge. Hollywood wasn’t entirely sure of what to do with her, so when she fell in love with Ellen Degeneres and insisted on taking the relationship public, you could practically hear the pencils scratching her off the A list. By the time I met with her, a few years down the road, she still seemed shocked by her rapid descent.

I listened sympathetically as she discussed the cowardice of the establishment, but on the inside I was thinking, you took a principled stand and expected what? To change society overnight? Like there weren’t 20,000 girls behind her who would give anything for that opportunity. But, in retrospect, maybe Heche’s defiance did change the world. Openly gay stars still don’t get cast as hetero leads but, as a society, we are so much more accepting. And yet, in the pantheon of gay heroes, it’s Degeneres who gets remembered, not Heche.

Read More: A Late-in-Life Coming Out Story: The Hurt Before the Happiness

Heche’s Bold Move

What are we to make of heroes who don’t understand the price they are paying? Children are taught that Rosa Parks was just a tired old woman who wanted a seat on a bus. In fact, she was a dedicated civil rights activist who knew exactly what she was doing.

What are we to make of heroes who don’t understand the price they are paying?

One reason Heche never got the recognition is because her relationship with Degeneres was a one off. After the two broke up, Heche returned to being a cis-gendered female. When Coley Laffoon, the father of Heche’s child and the man she was about to marry, returned home the afternoon I was visiting her, I was shocked by the sweetly vacant dude who kissed Heche. He seemed so young! Like he should have been out skateboarding with his buds instead of loading up on Pampers. (Entertainment Weekly called him “a golden retriever of a man.”) Heche had dated some seriously powerful men in the entertainment business. For his movie Bowfinger, former beau Steve Martin even based the part of a sexually scheming ingenue who ends up dating the most important lesbian in Hollywood on Heche.

Heche was not  stupid—she lacked a formal education but she was intellectually ambitious. She named her kid after the Homer Simpson from Nathanel West’s dystopian Hollywood novel, Day of the Locust. But she was a person who profoundly lacked common sense. As the stylist from the Vogue shoot that day later said to me, “She seems too smart for the path she’s going down.” Years later, I read that she was bitter at having to pay Laffoon spousal support long after the marriage was over.

Trauma and Pain

When I posted a version of these comments on my Facebook page, I was taken aback by the vitriol for Heche’s ill-fated decision to get behind the wheel after doing drugs. (Cocaine and fentanyl were found in her system.) In their eyes, her irresponsibility abrogated any sympathy.

Maybe we need to acknowledge that the line between what some call crazy and brave is thinner than we care to admit.

Others saw her actions as a direct result of her traumatic childhood, one in which she was repeatedly raped by her father before she was 13. As her friend and Men in Trees co-star Emily Bergl, posted on Facebook, “I don’t justify many of Anne’s actions, and the people, family and children whom she has hurt so deeply….. But we so rarely investigate the abuse, the gaslighting, the misogyny, the homophobia that drives people to finally take up the ‘crazy’ mantle that’s been placed upon them, and in Anne’s case, I imagine it began when she was being abused as a child.”

Maybe we need to acknowledge that the line between what some call crazy and brave is thinner than we care to admit. Heche lived a complicated life and left this this earth in such an awful way at age 53, it almost seemed predetermined by the great screenwriter in the sky. The one who doesn’t believe in happy endings.

Read More: Farewell Margot Kidder: Actress, Mother, Trailblazer

By Rebecca Johnson

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