From One Donahue To Another
Phil Donahue and I didn’t just share a surname—we also shared a birthday, cusp Sagittarians born on Yule, the longest night of the year. Through much of the 1980s we also shared an hour every weekday afternoon, his The Phil Donahue Show serving as the crown jewel of my after school experience. For reasons I couldn’t name then but understand more now, I loved it.
Twins
Maybe I felt so connected to him because I watched those first episodes with my grandmother, and because we were both Donahues. I remember asking her if we were related (we are not). Though he did look like he could be a member of my extended family—pale Irish face, gin blossom nose, round cheeks, bright smile—we were similar, right down to our very 80s, thick-framed glasses.
When Phil Donahue died on August 18 it felt like a gut punch. Now it would just be me, Samuel L. Jackson, and Kiefer Sutherland celebrating our solstice birthday, while Phil and Frank Zappa shared a cake on the other side. And true, it felt like another part of my childhood was resurfacing in my memories only so that I could lose it again, during a period of life that has bitten through me with the sharp teeth of aching nostalgia. But I was also sad because honestly, I forgot how important Phil Donahue really was.
“I was also sad because honestly, I forgot how important Phil Donahue was. ”
The legacy of daytime talk is complicated. We have the Oprahs of the genre who have brought light and positivity to their afternoon timeslots, and then we have the Jerry Springers and Maury Poviches, bringing carnival chaos and paternity tests (no shade, I owned Jerry Springer’s Uncensored VHS tape). Donahue is sometimes lumped in with the latter, a tragic mistake considering just how much of a pioneer he was. At the start of his 29-year long run, he did something no one else had: He brought the audience into the conversation.
This may seem commonplace now, but at the time it wasn’t just new, it was really, really important. His audience was made up of mostly women, and in a very real way Donahue offered them a voice in the national conversation for the first time. His subject matter wasn’t created for “women” in the way it was back then, either. It was less cooking and homemaking, more politics, more culture, more true journalism. In interviews throughout his life, he would attest that the audience was the most important part of the show, and that they asked the hard-hitting, no B.S. questions that needed to be answered. They were as valuable to The Phil Donahue Show as the host himself.
Feminist Barbara Smith on The Phil Donahue Show, 1989.
While the show’s Ohio roots meant guests were hard to come by in the beginning, the choice of audience participation was no accident of programming: Donahue was a self-described feminist, later married to Marlo Thomas, one of the most outspoken women’s rights activists of her generation. Icon Gloria Steinem was also a repeat guest on the show. Donahue innately saw the way women could drive the conversation forward, and the importance of the reciprocal dialogue his format provided. Additionally, he was acutely aware of his ability to give Black women a voice on a large-scale platform. In this clip, his clear understanding of white privilege is eons ahead its time, and as he speaks to a panel of leading feminists including Barbara Smith, he stands back as they give voice to the invisibility—but tireless work— of WOC in the movement. Smith laughingly tells him, “There is a huge number of women of color in the women’s movement—it’s just that we don’t get the media. This is a real treat for us!”
A self-described “bad Catholic” (#relatable), Donahue unflinchingly covered the sexual abuse of children in the Catholic church as far back as 1993, soon after Sinead O’Connor was globally shunned for tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. In his home state of Ohio, he petitioned local church leaders to use money they had collected to build a cathedral to instead offer services for lower income families in the community (officials built it anyway). He also often challenged the church’s related antisexual theology and the way its propensity for shame lent to an insidious culture of secrecy that set the stage for decades of abuse.
An ally to the LGBTQIA+ community, he used his platform in the 80s and 90s to address the AIDS crisis and the gay liberation movement in a way no other talk show host would dare. In 1986, he interviewed a panel of gay parents, introducing a cultural norm we take for granted today with tremendous empathy and respect.
Phil Donahue was far ahead of his time, but he also seemed like a truly likable person (ahem, Donahue trait). Oprah has said that without Donahue, there would have been no Oprah. And even when his medium became corrupted by the likes of Springer, Phil never spoke badly about them. In his mind there was room for everyone.
If you have a moment and are interested in a life story that will make you feel positive about the impact one person can make in the world, I really recommend Michael Barbaro’s audio obituary, What Phil Donahue Meant To Me, featured on The Daily.
Here’s to Phil Donahue. Thank you for being a standard bearer of our name.
