Remember Family Ties? No, of course you don’t. You’re busy people, and we shouldn’t expect you to remember it.

But it was a 1980s sitcom. And it had a woman in it. And it turns out that the woman is a lesbian. That’s approximately all there is to this story. Thanks for reading!

Oh, alright. It’s apparently quite a big story so we’ll elaborate a bit. The woman in question is Meredith Baxter, who played Michael J Fox’s mother in Family Ties. And now, a full 20 years after anybody has even had the slightest ambient thought about her, Meredith Baxter has told the world that she is a lesbian. So, um, well done?

It’s never really a surprise when celebrities announce that they’re lesbians – usually because they did such a half-arsed job of concealing it that everybody knew anyway. That’s why the only person who flinched when Jodie Foster outed herself was that man who shot Ronald Reagan out of love for her, because the news made him feel pretty silly in retrospect. It’s also why nobody cared when Lindsay Lohan decided to become a lesbian, because she’s reported to have slept with Jude Law beforehand, and we expect that’s basically exactly the same as sleeping with a woman anyway.

But Meredith Baxter? That’s completely different. Were we shocked because Meredith Baxter played the archetypal mother figure in the 1980s sitcom Family Ties? No. Were we shocked because Meredith Baxter has been married to three different men over the course of her life? No. We were shocked because we genuinely didn’t have a bloody clue who Meredith Baxter was. But now we do so, you know, we’re not very shocked any more.

Anyway, here’s the story – Meredith Baxter decided that she was a lesbian seven years ago, and nobody cared. Then she went on a special lesbian cruise with a woman and it became news. So, rather than give Perez Hilton the chance to take a photo of her and scrawl a badly-drawn MS Paint fanny hanging out of her mouth, Meredith chose to appear on the Today show and tell the world on her own terms. Even though, and we can’t really overstate this enough, NOBODY CARES. MSNBC reports:

“I am a lesbian and it was a later-in-life recognition,” she told Matt Lauer on TODAY. “Some people would say, well, you’re living a lie and, you know, the truth is — not at all. This has only been for the past seven years… I’ve always lived a very private life,” said the actress, who’s never even had a publicist. “To come out and disclose stuff is very antithetical to who I am.”

What? Meredith Baxter hasn’t even got a publicist? That’s crazy talk! No wonder talk of her being a lesbian has been blasted out of all proportion! Meredith Baxter hasn’t even got a publicist! Why, the only people who don’t have publicists these days are either people who aren’t famous at all, or…

Oh. Oh, we sort of answered our own question there, didn’t we? Oh well.

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