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| MOMMY FEAREST: Nancy Heche’s book makes “Call Me Crazy” Anne appear more credible than ever. |
Anne’s mom, Nancy Heche, visited North Texas last week to promote a new memoir, “The Truth Comes Out: The Story of My Heart’s Transformation” (Regan Books, 2006).
About a month ago, her publicist started jerking me around — asking if I wanted to interview Nancy Heche, knowing I write for a queer newspaper.
The publicist explained that Nancy had a new message of “respect” and “love” for the gay community.
An interview would certainly be newsworthy.
Nancy’s a popular speaker on the ex-gay circuit.
Just last year, she appeared at a Focus on the Family event that explored curing “preventable and treatable” homosexuality.
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| THE ADVOCATE: July 19, 2005. Page 26. |
Has Nancy changed her anti-gay stripes?
Hardly.
I quickly got the gist of her message while reading the one-sheet that accompanied her book.
This phrase leaped off the page: “[Nancy] Heche was forced to deal with disdain toward the homosexual lifestyle.”
Anytime you catch someone using a buzz-term like “homosexual lifestyle,” you know you’re dealing with an ignoramus who’s smart enough to know better.
An interview with Dallas Voice was never scheduled — I suspect because in the past few weeks, gay media outlets across the country had already been tipped off about the “hate the sin” tone of the book, which has been rightfully slammed.
The Heche family history is sordid.
Nancy’s husband and Anne’s father, Don Heche, was a DL nightmare and one of the first cases of AIDS diagnosed.
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| PICTURE-PERFECT LIFESTYLE: The Heches, from left, Nancy, Abigail, Nathan, Donald and Anne. |
He died in 1983 at the age of 45.
Religion dominated the Heche family’s every move: bible study, church choir, summer ecumenical conferences, Methodism, Baptism, evangelicalism, fundamentalism, Calvinism and something called “the heretical Arminian doctrine of free will.”
By all accounts, Don was a rotten and weird dad: physically attractive, exceptionally creative and a mind-game expert.
When she’s not thoroughly detailing the minutiae of Don and Nancy’s budding romance at Bible camp, Nancy’s book primarily focuses on Don’s deception.
She continually explains that even though Don was a raging freak and obvious liar, she never answered the constant ringing of the Clue Phone.
Faith in her Bible-sanctioned marriage made Nancy blind, deaf and stupid.
Nancy and Don had five kids to care for, Anne being the youngest.
They were always broke. And Don routinely made decisions that ended in financial disaster.The Heches were the family that left town in middle of the night with a wake of debt behind them.
What’s the “disdain” Nancy had to deal with?
She married a man who liked sex with other men — or “bisexual,” which is how Nancy describes Don — who could never admit it.
So Don cheated and lied.
He even turned Nancy on to poppers and cocaine to spice up their sex life.
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| CLUE: poppers, a small vial of amyl nitrite used for inhalation that makes a popping sound when opened. |
When Nancy finally figured things out, she was pissed.
And whom did she blame?
The “homosexual community.”
So when her talented movie-star daughter announced that she was dating Ellen DeGeneres, Nancy began to detest gays even more.
And she was angry with Anne.
How could Nancy’s daughter become a lesbian?
Hadn’t the gay community ruined the Heche family?
Wait a minute.
Angry?
With... Anne?
Anne wrote a book, too: “Call Me Crazy,” which Nancy makes a cruel reference to in her book.
Hardly anyone read Anne’s book, which was released right after 9/11.
And the mountain of horrible reviews didn’t boost sales.
But I read every shocking word.
And I loved it.
I’ll never forget that day —Aug. 20, 2000 — when the news broke that an Ecstasy-laden Anne Heche had broken up with Ellen DeGeneres.
Anne thought she was the New Messiah and had wandered the California desert like John the Baptist looking to board The Spaceship of Love.
A year later, Anne released “Call Me Crazy,” revealing she had an alter-ego named “Celestia,” who spoke in her own trippy-cool language whenever she communicated with God.
But the focus of Anne’s book wasn’t about the DeGeneres affair or Celestia.
It was about her spineless, heartless mom.
The very beginning of “Call Me Crazy” is a conversation where Anne tells Nancy that her dad sexually abused her.
But Nancy refuses to acknowledge Anne’s pain.
What Don Heche did to Anne is unspeakable.
During the filming of “Six Days, Seven Nights,” Anne tried to prove to Nancy that the abuse actually happened — like recalling that Anne had herpes sores when she was 8.
In this conversation, Nancy told Anne that when she was a baby, Anne had terrible “diaper rash.”
That the sores on Anne’s vagina were so bad, they couldn’t put diapers on her.
There was also a health scare when Don was diagnosed with hepatitis, which is recounted in both memoirs.
However, Anne’s version wins the authenticity prize.
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| SOUNDS FISHY... “The Truth Comes Out,” by Nancy Heche, page 85. |
But Nancy said she couldn’t think about Anne’s childhood “back then.”
And Nancy never apologized to Anne for not protecting her.
That’s why Anne went “crazy.”
When your dad dies of AIDS in the early ’80s and he was sexually molesting you, it takes a while for the “Do I have AIDS, too?” panic to wear off.
For years, when Anne was an adult, she underwent intense psychological and even drug therapy.
And each therapist told Anne that — although her dad was evil — dealing with her mom’s disregard of the incest is the root of Anne’s problems.
Anne says she fell in love with Ellen DeGeneres because she saw a gay person who was free, open and happy about who she was — the polar opposite of her dad.
Nancy couldn’t accept Anne and Ellen’s relationship.
And when Ellen went into a depression after her show was cancelled, the relationship fell apart.
Feeling desperate, unloved and confused, Anne had her much-publicized episode in the Fresno desert.
In “Call Me Crazy,” Anne says she doesn’t identify as straight or gay — that she has transcended those labels.
Anne also refuses to disavow any of the work she and Ellen did to bolster gay rights.
Nowhere in “The Truth Comes Out” does Nancy even mention the Heche family incest.
Somewhere buried inside Nancy’s book is a message about not being angry at people who “live homosexually” — an adverbial phrase I’ve never come across before.
Nancy has been interviewed.
There’s a clip of her as Bill O’Reilly’s guest on YouTube where Nancy acts like she and Anne are old pals.
But last September, Anne issued the following statement on her website:
“This nonsense about my mother praying for me is really making me angry. My mother never approved of my relationship with Ellen. Her hatred for our relationship is one of the many things that ultimately led to my breaking off all communication with her. (My mother, that is, not Ellen.)”
Nancy’s publicist recently told me that mother and daughter were on speaking terms.
When I specifically asked if they’ve spoken to each other within the last 13 months, he said he was unable to confirm that.
At press time, I emailed him again for confirmation and got a cryptic response that said, “they’ve spoken and they do speak...”
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| Oct. 27, 2006 |
LETTER TO THE EDITOR | Oct. 27, 2006
I wanted to respond after reading the article by Daniel Kushner regarding Nancy Heche’s memoir (“Maybe Anne Heche wasn’t so crazy after all,” Dallas Voice, Oct. 13).
I did contact him to forward information on Nancy Heche’s book as she was traveling to Dallas for some media interviews.
Mr. Kushner’s interpretation of being “jerked around” is humorous to me as he was never promised an interview, and after the first conversation I found him to be short on patience and long on accusations.
I could have ignored his phone calls, emails and request for the book, but I did not.
I had a suspicion that Mr. Kushner would not write a favorable article because of his over-aggressive and pushy attitude toward me.
He may not realize that, as a publicity firm, we have several clients and are in contact with countless media outlets and in most cases, other firms would have ignored him after his attitude and tone became negative.
I understand journalism (I worked for several years as a journalist) and I understand his desire for attention, and not necessarily gaining respect, through his column I am surprised that a “legitimate journalist” would have the negative feelings toward an individual that he does not know or has not met as he does toward Nancy Heche.
That only makes me question if Mr. Kushner embodies the prejudicial attitude that many in the gay community believe the Christian community demonstrates.
It is apparent that Mr. Kushner did not understand the message of Nancy’s memoir — how she survived many trials in her life (including the death of three of her children which he failed to include) and her own heart’s transformation toward the homosexual community.
She also boldly shares the many mistakes and the pain she dealt with from choices she made and how they impacted her family.
Her message is not judgmental or preachy, but one of love and understanding.
I believe Mr. Kushner’s personal bias tainted his view of her message and is apparent in his article which is a dis- service to your readers.
Mr. Kushner wrote: “An interview with Dallas Voice was never scheduled — I suspect because in the past few weeks, gay media outlets across the country had already been tipped off about the “hate the sin” tone of the book, which has been rightfully slammed.”
He knows the reason I did not schedule an interview, and his suspicions are inaccurate.
I answered his question regarding Nancy and Anne’s communication.
He apparently has trouble retaining answers that have been provided to him.
Rather than focusing on a “she said — she said” article between Anne and Nancy's individual books and the fact he has not personally interviewed either one of them and has no idea what has changed since the release of Anne's book, he might have been better suited to limit his judgments and better understand the true message of the book
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| Photo via Twitter. |
Editor’s response
Life+ Style Editor Daniel Kusner — whose name is correctly spelled “Kusner” and not “Kushner” — stands by his original report and his assertion that Nancy Heche still promotes the ex-gay movement and is now trying to infiltrate gay media outlets with anti-gay bigotry disguised as love and acceptance.
To support his assertion, Kusner notes that over the course of six weeks, Ben Laurro sent him a hand-written note and at least nine emails and spoke with him three times on the phone in an effort to schedule an interview with Nancy Heche during her Oct. 2-3 visit to North Texas.
During this exchange, Laurro requested Kusner send him a list of questions he had in mind for the interview.
Kusner told Laurro he only had one: Why doesn’t Nancy address the primary point of Anne Heche’s memoir — “Call Me Crazy” — that Anne was incestuously abused by her closeted father, Don Heche, and that Nancy never apologized for, dealt with or acknowledged her daughter’s anguish?
Laurro said he couldn’t subject Nancy — a college-level instructor and a practicing psychotherapist, who apparently has a doctorate in theology — to such a question, that Nancy has been through too much already.
And as for Nancy’s message of “love and understanding” for the gay community, here’s a quote from Nancy’s book: “Don’s father [Anne’s grandfather] was a bum. He was unshaven and reeked of beer and cigarettes — the classic profile of the father of a homosexual man, as I learned much later.”
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| PAGE 37:“The Truth Comes Out: When Someone You Love is in A Same Sex Relationship.” |
Heche was involved with DeGeneres for three years before walking out on her in August of last year.
“As we can all attest, having witnessed her brilliant exploits over the years, Anne has many ways of getting the attention she wants,” her older sister Susan told the newspaper.
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