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FALL 2009
THE MAGAZINE FOR LESBIANS OVER 35
Addiction to cable
news stardom:
Jane Velez-Mitchell
bares it all
15
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VOLUME 4 #3
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JANE VELEZ-MITCHELL
Addiction to cable news stardom:
Jane Velez-Mitchell bares it all. By Joanna Walters
Jane and Jane
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Velez-Mitchell, already well known as a TV
anchor, reporter and Celebrity Justice and
CNN commentator, received an unexpected
early morning phone call.
It was Friday, 6:30 a.m. in Los Angeles,
and she was sipping a cup of coffee “and
staring at a palm tree outside my window”
when the phone rang.
A CNN executive told her a slot had
opened up and offered her the chance to
host her own show for the foreseeable future—starting that evening. Could she host
from L.A. that day and then get on a plane
to New York to start there on Monday?
As Velez-Mitchell put it, “Does Pinocchio have a wooden nose?”
With characteristic verve she replied,
“Absolutely,” grabbed her two Chihuahuas
and started packing.
She’s having a ball and has won plaudits for her upbeat style and forthright, often
liberal, common-sense views expressed on
her show.
“I’m high energy,” she declares, then
goes on to admit with a wry smile, “If I had
a nickel for every time I was in a restaurant
and should have used my indoor voice....”
Her show and website are a unique mix
of news, analysis and her own opinion editorial pieces on anything from prison policy
to domestic violence. “When I get started
on something, I work myself up,” she says.
Her office does not have exterior
windows, and one wall is covered in small
screens broadcasting the news of the moment on numerous channels. Suddenly, she
leaps for the remote control and tunes in to
a breaking news story where cameras have
captured a courtroom brawl. “Wow, look at
that,” she says, excited.
She loves being the more mature
commentator with the youthful, infectious
enthusiasm. “Women of ‘a certain age’
are getting their own shows, like myself
and Nancy Grace, for example. Things are
changing, and people love us; we are feisty,
progressive women out to shatter all those
stereotypes and bring our unique life perspective to the issues of the day,” she says.
Velez-Mitchell spent most of her career
as a news reporter, without adding opinions
and analysis to her reports. But gradually
she became a guest pundit and realized
she had more and more to say about
things. She loves being able to express
JANE VELEZ-MITCHELL
PHOTO: JEREMY FREEMAN
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Jane Velez-Mitchell loves smashing
the stereotypes.
She’s the high-voltage television host
who electrifies the screen with her opinions
and delivery and is coming into superstardom only after reaching her 50s and coming out as a lesbian.
And she is the feisty interviewer with the
confident aura, who spent decades secretly
shuddering with insecurity off-camera and
drinking herself into oblivion.
Now, openly gay, a zealous animalrights activist, environmentalist, vegan,
sober, witty, self-declared proud person
of color, and breast cancer survivor, Jane
Velez-Mitchell is who and where she
wants to be.
She suddenly rocketed last fall from a
successful career as a dynamic TV reporter
and fledgling legal commentator to host of
her own show—Issues with Jane VelezMitchell on HLN.
“What an exciting adventure,” she
beams, grinning from behind the desk in
her office at bustling Columbus Circle in the
heart of New York City, where sister channels
HLN and CNN broadcast from the parent
company’s towering Time Warner Center.
She’s even becoming a brand of sorts,
a sign flashing up on screen referring to her
as “JVM” whenever the number is displayed
for viewers to call in and sound off with
Jane and her panel of pundits on the issue
of the day.
And her autobiography, iWant, is just
out, bearing the subtitle My Journey from
Addiction and Overconsumption to a Simpler, Honest Life.
The book is a very frank, often highly
witty, always compelling account of her flamboyant professional and personal lives and
chaotic upbringing. It sashays from dramatic
anecdotes and earnest descriptions of how
the Twelve Steps from alcoholism and addictive behavior to sobriety saved her sanity
and helped her find her true self, to intense
declarations of her new-found ethics. “I just
talked about my own experiences,” she
says. “Badgering and lecturing doesn’t work;
you have to make it entertaining.”
The big break that launched her as a
TV host happened very suddenly last fall.
Glenn Beck had just announced he was
jumping ship from his 7 p.m. weeknights
show on HLN to Fox. The very next day,
her views, not just stay within the “straight”
reporting box.
Now that she has her own issuesbased show, she is reveling in it. “It feels
like a breath of fresh air,” she says. “I’m
looking at events through my own prism,
bringing in my experience as a woman, a
person of color—I’m Puerto Rican as well
as being Irish—a vegan, an animal-rights
activist, a lesbian. There’s been such a narrow range of those who we hear opinions
from on the TV.”
Of course, Rachel Maddow blasted
onto our screens with her MSNBC news
show last year, too, creating an overnight
sensation.
Now Maddow and Velez-Mitchell are
wowing audiences across America—and
lifting lesbian spirits as out, gay women in
the process.
While Maddow came out, both to
herself and to the world, as a teenager,
Velez-Mitchell was a late-developing
lesbian. She only made the move to her
first girlfriend in 2002, at the age of 46,
via a young adulthood of boyfriends and a
brief marriage to a man. Although she fell
deeply for a woman she describes as her
“first true love,” she still struggled with her
sexuality for a time until she dramatically
came out, on the air, in 2007.
A touching and amusing chapter in her
autobiography describes the whole story.
When she finally came out, she was
inspired to do so partly by that other lateblooming, out lesbian, financial expert Suze
Orman.
In the summer of 2007, at the age
of 50, Velez-Mitchell was chatting on the
California talk-radio station KABC with gay,
conservative “Log Cabin Republican” Al
Rantel, discussing the hypocrisy of anti-gay
politicians who get mixed up in homosexual
scandals.
Suddenly, she felt like she was
“trapped in a pressure cooker” of her own
conscience, by accusing politicians of dishonesty while she was “lying by omission”
about her own sexuality.
The topic of discussion was U.S. Sen.
Larry Craig’s alleged homosexual-signal
shoe shuffle in an airport toilet.
During a commercial break, she told
Rantel that she was a lesbian and wanted to
come out. She quickly phoned her girlfriend
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zanier, but that’s all.”
And she sometimes likes stepping out
in “storm trooper boots.”
She’s still friends with her ex-husband
and with her last serious boyfriend—who,
when she admitted she had feelings for
women, generously told her she had to
explore them.
He later admitted, hilariously and intuitively, that, following his first date with Jane,
he’d told a friend he reckoned she was a
lesbian and an alcoholic.
Velez-Mitchell gave up drinking when
she was 39. She had begun tippling at
her parents’ bohemian New York parties
when she was only 8 or 9, cruising around
the room finishing up martini dregs, then
progressing to become a serious drinker
in her teens.
She described the long road of being
the uproarious drunk for years, sometimes
entertaining, often embarrassing; sometimes having wild fun, often hating herself
deep down, occasionally blacking out and,
all the while, masking her sexuality and a
catalogue of insecurities.
She was a high-functioning alcoholic,
as she puts it, racing around as a highly
successful, daring reporter, covering breaking news and major stories such as the
Michael Jackson child molestation trial in
2005, and earning nicknames like “Rocket
Socks” from colleagues.
She dedicated her book to her IrishAmerican father, expressing her wish that
he’d shaken his alcoholism before dying
prematurely and thus missing his only
child’s best years as she matured.
Her mother is 93 and going strong,
and it was her Puerto Rican last name that
Velez-Mitchell chose to adopt some years
ago—a double-barreled last name that
proudly reflects her dual heritage.
“Suit up and shut up,” is her approach,
which seems to free her to deliver a
show packed with punch and personality
every night.
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PHOTO: JEREMY FREEMAN
JANE VELEZ-MITCHELL
to warn her of what she was about to do, and
then, upon resumption of live broadcasting,
she casually told the listeners that she thought,
in the context of the discussion, she should
mention that she lived with a woman.
Now she describes the experience
as adding herself to “a chain reaction of
honesty.” “It was a big relief when I was
finally able to be myself,” she says.
She and her girlfriend broke up in
2008 and, in hindsight, VelezMitchell says she drove her
girlfriend away by being a
workaholic and simultaneously
too clinging and overbearing in
the relationship—what therapists
call codependency.
Currently she is dating.
A woman?
“Yes.”
It is women from here on in?
“Yes,” she says firmly, again beaming
brightly.
Wearing an iridescent green blouse, her
hair styled in a long shag ’do, VelezMitchell creases her delicately madeup, elfin face into a girlie grin and
says she was a tomboy as a kid.
“I was a total tomboy,” she
says. “I always felt uncomfortable
in frilly dresses.” Although, being
brought up in the 1950s, she
didn’t refuse to wear them.
Now, even if she was
not on camera, she says
she doesn’t think she’d style
herself as any more butch than
she appears on screen. She
doesn’t like those stereotypical
categories anyway.
“This is me,” she says. “If I
wasn’t on TV, I would like to have
a pink streak in my hair. I’d be a little
COVER
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people are benefiting from my mistakes.
I get the emails all the time from people
who are struggling with something.
“I think there are always things where
you look back and say, ‘Coulda, woulda,
shoulda,’ but beyond that, you can’t actually go back and do it again,” she says.
She still works hard but not compulsively, happy, she says, to be a cog in the
wheel.
“Suit up and shut up” is her approach,
she says—an outlook that seems to free
her to deliver a show packed with punch
and personality every night.
Does she feel she missed out by
discovering women later in life?
She looks surprised. “Well, I don’t feel
the need to catch up,” she says.
“I had a very intense experience,” she
says of finally meeting her first girlfriend
and coming out. In her book, she describes their first kiss as “the moment I’d
been waiting for my whole life.”
She picks up the TV remote again,
ready to monitor a crime press conference that might make a segment for that
evening’s show. She’s radiating energetic
and confident vibes.
In life and love, Velez-Mitchell is just
hitting her stride.
JANE VELEZ-MITCHELL
Once she gave up alcohol—and
cigarettes—Velez-Mitchell went through
some classic stages during which she
replaced her addiction to drink with addiction to other things: over-eating, compulsive
shopping, ego-driven over-working. She described those days in her book, along with
explanations of the underlying psychology
and how she worked her way out of those
obsessions, too.
“Now coffee is my only vice,” she grins,
brewing up a strong one at her desk.
She has taken to her new ethical
causes with such fervor that if you forget
she’s a vegan and inquire about milk for
your coffee, she doesn’t hesitate to scold
that humans are the only animals who steal
milk from another species.
She starts pulling pink and green scrunchup shopping bags from her work bag.
“I’m trying not to use plastic bags—the
little white bags of death,” she says.
She is proud of the animal rights stories
she pursues passionately for TV and of her
ethical shopping habits, trying to make a
difference every day, she says, acutely in
tune with “the sadness I experience about
the cruelty in the world.”
And, while feisty in her TV presentation,
she is trying to take the ego out of her work
and be simply “a worker amongst workers,”
she says, sometimes quoting the Serenity
Prayer off the air.
She doesn’t describe herself as a
star—but admits she would have relished
the label 20 years ago, when she was a
raging dynamo, often out of control.
Does she miss anything about the
pre-sober Jane, or did she lose anything by
becoming less wild?
“No, I didn’t lose anything,” she says.
“The biggest fear when giving up an addiction is that fun ends; you become boring
and just one of the pod.”
Instead, she found authenticity. “It actually opens you up to the real adventure of
life,” she says.
She doesn’t go so far as to say she
would live her life differently if she had the
chance. But she acknowledges that her
experiences and her openness about them,
from admitting to and addressing her addictive personality to coming out as a lesbian,
are now helping others.
“I don’t regret the past,” she says. “Now
BOOK REVIEW
iWant: My Journey From
Addiction and Overconsumption
to a Simpler Honest Life
By Jane Velez-Mitchell
(Health Communications Inc., $24.95)
Jane Velez-Mitchell, the award-winning journalist,
activist and national talk show host known for her
provocative examination of the current news on Issues
with Jane Velez-Mitchell HLN (Headline News), has
written an equally provocative look at life off-camera in iWant: My Journey From
Addiction and Overconsumption to a Simpler Honest Life.
Velez-Mitchell’s unflinching memoir details her lifetime struggle with alcoholism and other addictions, her realization that she was a lesbian, and finally, her
battle with breast cancer. Velez-Mitchell battled alcoholism until she was 36, when
she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and became a firm believer in the power of the
Twelve Steps.
Many lesbians will recognize Velez-Mitchell’s journey to realizing—and accepting—her true sexuality as a lesbian. Velez-Mitchell took it a step farther than most of
us, though—coming out in a big (and proud) way on KABC-AM’s “Al Rantel Show.”
Velez-Mitchell’s iWant: My Journey From Addiction and Overconsumption to a
Simpler Honest Life is a heartfelt memoir that offers hope and motivation for those
dealing with alcoholism, food and work addiction, and other addictions, for those
searching for the courage to be true to themselves, and for those looking for a new,
better way of approaching the world.
But Velez-Mitchell’s book offers inspiration and promotes courage for
everyone facing personal and professional challenges, making iWant: My
Journey From Addiction and Overconsumption to a Simpler Honest Life a
valuable addition to any bookshelf.
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