Kelly & Mark: The LGBTQ+ Allies We Didn't Know We Needed

Anyone who knows me understands my enduring affection for the longtime morning show Live, which started way back in 1988 with its original hosts, Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford. As I wrote after his death, Regis had a profound — and odd — impact on me. For some reason, I dreamed about him all the time — not in a weird way, but just two guys playing golf or tennis, partying in South Beach, having a beer or smoking a doobie.

When Regis left, I continued to watch the show, with the charismatic Kelly Ripa. How can you not love her? I watched her with a trio of cohosts, starting with Michael Strahan, then Ryan Seacrest, and now her husband, the hunky Mark Consuelos.

As a connoisseur of the show, I now believe that Kelly has found her perfect cohost. Mark complements her both in life and work. With her husband sitting beside her each morning, the two of them exude fun, offer discoverability, and predispose familiarity. The conversation between the two, during “host chat,” is invitingly intrusive as they discuss their intimate idiosyncrasies.

It's a 21^st-century daily pleasurable peek inside a TV couple that colorizes and modernizes the monochromatic Ozzie and Harriet of yesteryear.

Watching the two of them emerge from backstage every morning is like watching your neighbors come through the door. Don’t get me wrong, I miss Regis and those dreams; however, after 22 years hosting the show, Kelly seems at home with her husband. The show is hers.

The daytime talk show got its impetus in 1951, when intrepid New York City radio and television personality Joe Franklin hosted the first one. Since that time, it has gone through many iterations. I remember watching The Mike Douglas Show back in the 1970s. Then, most famously, came Donahue, Oprah, and Ellen.

When I spoke to Ellen DeGeneres at the end of her show, she told me that when she started out, distributors were reluctant to sell a talk show hosted by a lesbian, so they created a package deal for affiliates featuring Ellen along with Sharon Osbourne’s new show. We all know what ensued, and Ellen succeeded primarily because she was just her authentic self and didn't hide her sexuality or her relationship with Portia.

Phoniness can be a very easy thing to spot with public figures, particularly those on television, and most especially for those on every day. One of the reasons why Kelly and Mark have the number one talk show – which includes late night as well – is because the two of them come out each morning as real people, and not characters performing in front of the camera. It’s like peering in on your friends having their morning coffee at the breakfast table.

Kelly and Mark rarely do interviews with the media, and why should they? They spend 15 minutes every morning putting it all out there. So, as an admittedly unabashed fan of the show and a journalist, I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to sit down with them. As a wise old man who has worked with the media for 35 years, I was on a covert mission to see if they were “the real deal.”

In journalism, it’s protocol to refer to the subjects you are writing about by their last names, i.e. Ripa and Consuelos; however, denoting the duo as Ripa and Consuelos seems rather distant and unfeeling, neither of which has anything to do with Kelly and Mark.

When Kelly walked in to see me, though she may be five-foot-nothing and quite petite, she filled the room and gave me a long hug. When Mark walked in, his beaming smile was the perfect complement to his wife’s effervescent brightness. They were as personable, charming, and funny as they are on-air, without pretension. It was easy to see their genuine affection for each other. When Kelly talked, Mark gazed, and similarly for Kelly when Mark talked. They touched each other’s arms frequently, and they laughed – a lot! Kelly said that in her life no one made her laugh like Mark did, and that was glaringly apparent.

We talked like old friends. At times, I felt like I was sitting in on one of their daily host chats, except this was more personal, particularly when we got to the subject of their unwavering support for our community.

Finally, as Kelly hugged me goodbye, she came in for the kill. “You’re going to be 60?” she inquisitively intoned. “Yes,” I said. “Well, you look amazing!”

Now, after that, do you think I’d write anything bad?

So as the show’s DJ, Déjà Vu Parker, says each morning, “And now, here are Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos…”

The Advocate: You’re almost a year in…

Mark: Nine months, nine months!

The Advocate: So it must be going well, since you're still married.

Kelly and Mark: Yes!

Mark: Yes, we're still married and very happy.

The Advocate: And I just wanted to see how you feel about the way things are going. Have you gotten your sea legs?

Mark: I can tell you that it’s as good as I thought it was going to be. It’s much better! 'm having so much fun. I'm learning the ropes. Again, I get to sit next to the best, so I always feel very supported. But I think we're having a really, really good time.

Kelly: Yes, we really are having a good time. I have to say that Mark, and I've said this before, but Mark, in about three days, got to a place of comfort that took me about five to eight years to get to in terms of the ease with which he does the job and the quality with which he does the job. It took me a lot longer to get comfortable, and I just cannot believe how easily he transitioned into the role as the host of this show.

The Advocate: Do you ever go home and then critique yourselves on what you should or shouldn’t have done?

Kelly and Mark: No, no.

Kelly: It's like a real separation of church and state in our house where we discuss work. And that's by design and part of our nature.

Mark: We don't typically come home and discuss our careers. We talk about the kids and their lives. It’s really normal.

The Advocate: When you started, were your kids a little apprehensive about the two of you working together?

Kelly: We waited until the night before to tell them, and they were like, "Oh, cool." And two of our kids thought Mark already worked there, which was how much they were paying attention.

The Advocate: Has anything surprised you?

Kelly: Yes! He is always revealing things I've never heard, which is amazing to me. And I think that I will say that in the nearly 30 years that I've known him, nobody makes me laugh more than Mark. And in terms of our crew, nobody makes them laugh more than Mark does.

He has a very diabolically funny sense of humor. He says things under his breath that most people wouldn't notice. But we are so tuned in to what he says that he just gives us little kernels to feast on throughout the day. Plus he’s very competitive, which has had an effect on our daily trivia game. If it were up to me, everyone would get a prize, but Mark makes people work for it.

The Advocate: I know Mark loves sports, and we were talking earlier about his favorite team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and mine, the Steelers.

Mark: The Steelers were the first football team that I followed when I moved to the U.S. In fact, I actually got a Steelers helmet for Christmas one year.

Kelly: You did?

Mark: Yes.

Kelly: Right? This is what I'm talking about. He reveals things that I never knew before.

The Advocate: Speaking of Christmas, what’s your favorite holiday memory as a family?

Mark: Maybe you can tell him what you did during COVID?

Kelly: I put the entire house on lockdown. At the time, the Delta variant was running through New York City, and it ran through our house, and I will say this, we are so blessed that everybody had their own bedroom, so that’s where I made everyone stay. I never got it, but Mark and the kids did. I even kissed Mark at New Year’s Eve that year and rolled the dice.

I said, I’m not getting COVID on my vacation. If I get it, I want to get it when I have to work since I have accrued 30 years of sick days, so I have plenty to use up. So we did Christmas from afar, but it was still very special since we were all together.

The Advocate: So you never got COVID?

Kelly: I recently had COVID, and I still don't know how I got it. I don't go anywhere. I don't do anything, besides a Madonna concert. You'll be hard-pressed to find me anywhere. Like I go to work, and I come home. I am a creature of habit. I’m not big on in nightlife, and I'm not a big socializer, and so when I got COVID it was a head-scratcher. I kept saying to Mark, "Where on earth did I get COVID from?" Not going to point fingers, but probably Gelman. I blame him for everything.

The Advocate: Speaking of socializing, I know you guys have gone public about the fact that you don’t drink. I stopped two years ago and wrote a column about it for Thanksgiving and was overwhelmed with the response. I know you haven’t talked about it much but wanted to get your thoughts.

Kelly: Yeah, Mark quit drinking before I did ,and I decided to do a sober February instead of January because February was shorter!

So, while I joked about that, I started to discover how I felt so great not drinking, and I never went back. And I never even thought about it again.

The Advocate: Yes, when I did it, I think my friends were a little disappointed, to be honest.

Kelly: Yes, when I quit smoking 30 years ago, nobody said to me, "Why did you quit smoking? What's wrong with you?" When I quit drinking, my friends were almost offended. Like borderline. And I just found that such an interesting dichotomy.

You know, I take such good care of myself. Why would I drink? I exercise every day. I eat a mostly vegetarian diet. I'm very mindful of what I put in my body. Why would I drink?

The Advocate: Well, I also know that another thing that is important to you guys is your support for our community. And one thing I love about your show is that you have tons of queer guests, which puts them in living rooms everywhere. It’s like what Ellen did for marriage equality. Having people be open, talk about themselves, it normalizes things the way they should be.

Having said that, and because our community is so important to you, what do you think about our community coming under attack, particularly this past year?

Mark: Well, I think it’s just horrible. You know, I remember doing The Gay Marriage Plays at Minetta Lane Theatre, which was about 12 years ago, so that was before gay marriage was passed in New York and in the U.S. I remember that I couldn't believe we had so many friends that couldn't get married in New York. And then when they could, thinking, OK, great, they finally got acceptance.

And now having that and so many other rights questioned and the community coming under attack, it feels like things are going backwards, and that is really troubling and upsetting.

Yet I think there's no better community that's ready to fight than your community. I think you have fought for so, so much, and while it’s awful that you have to keep fighting, no one else knows how to fight like the LGBTQ+ community and standing up for what's right.

Kelly: Here’s what I think. Any time you dehumanize people, the attacker, the person doing the dehumanization, they are dehumanizing themselves. Really. Because when you stop seeing everyone as people with equal rights and equal liberties, you're the one that's been dehumanized.

And I know you mentioned our show, but I have to tell you that it’s in reverse. The community has done a lot for us. A lot. So much. And we’re humbled. We feel so proud of our close friends and family members, and we feel so proud to be able to support them and the community.