‘Family’ Ties

Since her TV career heyday in the 1970s and ’80s as a darling of the popular primetime series Family and Family Ties, Meredith Baxter has mainly flown under the radar. That is with the exception of a few acclaimed turns in made-for-TV movies such as My Breast and A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story. That is until she boarded the Sweet Caribbean Cruise with thousands of other lesbians last month. If the woman who famously played Elyse Keaton, liberal mother to Michael J. Fox’s conservative Alex, on the long-running sitcom Family Ties, thought she would go unnoticed amidst generations of gay women who idolized her for her blonde-haired, blue-eyed, all-American good looks, she was wrong.

The Advocate: Let’s get right to it. What has brought you to this point, where you’re coming out publicly?
Meredith Baxter: Well, to be honest, it was time. And promoted probably from the attention brought from having been on the cruise, I knew that something was coming from that. So I thought, Let me just beat them to it and tell it in my words instead of someone’s made-up words.

Read the entire interview at: Advocate.com!