By MONROE ROARK
mroark@thecitizennews.com

My colleague John Thompson put it best when summing up the persona of Rosie O'Donnell: "She's an actress."

He wasn't just referring to her movie roles. On her daytime talk show, and even in her private life, everything is a bit too "scripted," as he put it.

Her current is-she-gay-or-isn't-she controversy is the biggest example of this. Ever since an article in New York magazine a year ago "outed" her for all intents and purposes, many of her fans, gay and straight, have waited breathlessly to hear it from her own lips.

Now she is on the verge of releasing a memoir that allegedly addresses various relationships with other women. Since that news was reported last week, her representatives have made no effort to deny it. Also last week, she appeared as a gay character on the hit television series "Will & Grace." She was also reported to have performed on a gay Caribbean cruise last weekend.

Is all of this coincidental, now that her own television show is winding down, that such an important facet of her life could be coming to life after years with nary a mention of it from her?

Wait a minute, you say. Why should you care if she's gay?

I don't care. Rosie O'Donnell's sexual orientation has no bearing on my life at all. What amuses me is her consistent and utter hypocrisy about it.

Like too many television personalities, Rosie has spent the past several years using her show as a personal soapbox for her liberal whining. This has led to a number of unprofessional outbursts, from her use of an offensive term in reference to presidential candidate Bob Dole at a 1996 public event to her shameful ambush of Tom Selleck on her show soon after the Columbine shootings. Apparently her anti-gun rants do not extend to her personal bodyguards, who are known to carry firearms in the presence of her and her children.

But it's on the gay issue where her hypocrisy shines the brightest. Nowhere can anyone find any occasion where she personally address her sexual orientation on her show or in her much-touted magazine, "Rosie."

When that publication was launched a year or so ago, she went to great lengths to point out that it would be a cutting-edge, progressive periodical, going so far as to snidely put down some of the more traditional aspects of other women's magazines, such as homemaking articles.

That's fine and good. But if you're so progressive, and if you're also living as a homosexual, why would you not announce it to the world? As another colleague, Michael Boylan, said, "It's never been more chic to be gay."

That's an easy one to answer. It all comes down to money. For all of her posturing, Rosie O'Donnell knows better than most that if she were true to the image she would most like to portray, her fans would leave in droves. For all of her sarcastic criticism of traditional women's magazines and their emphasis on homemaking, she knows that those women make up the vast majority of her television audience.

So she has continued to live this lie every day for the length of her show, portraying herself as the girl down the street inviting everyone over for a slumber party, chatting about her encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture and carrying on about her schoolgirl crush on Tom Cruise, because she knows that's what her audience wants to hear.

Don't misunderstand me. No one can be 100 percent certain that Rosie is a lesbian until she says so herself. But if it is true, then the gay community should be the most outraged at her behavior. She has spewed her pro-abortion, anti-gun rhetoric when it suited her and was fashionable to do so. But when the lights come on in her studio every afternoon and she begins to supposedly share every little detail of her personal life with her audience, she apparently feels that her sexual orientation is not important enough to include in the conversation. Or maybe it's too important, from a negative ratings perspective.

Mr. Thompson hit the nail on the head. Rosie is an actress, all right. And we may soon find out that her talk show stint was her best performance of all.

[Monroe Roark can be reached at mroark@TheCitizenNews.com.]

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