Dear Abby's pro-gay videotape vs. stubborn insistence by her twin, Ann Landers, that homosexuality was pathological, delivered with an Omaha meatloaf recipe

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In the wake of the passing, Wednesday, of "Dear Abby" Pauline Phillips, Peter Hartlaub revisited her long record of speaking up for gays and lesbians, and brought to light a Public Service Announcement she recorded in 1981.
     The tape wasn't released until the final days of then-governer Jerry Brown's administration and was the subject of a fight between B.T. Collins, Brown's chief of staff, who scuttled it because it "smacked of advocacy" and California's mental health chief, Al Loeb, who had quit two years earlier because of the decision to suppress the tape.
     Hartlaub has promised to contact Jerry Brown (once again California's governor) and former Assemblyman, Art Agnos, who raised a stink three decades ago about the video's deep sixing, to see if a copy exists. If so, he plans to upload it to YouTube.

1976: America's 20th-century Advice-To-The-Lovelorn
duopoly, Sioux City, Iowa's Friedman twins Ann Landers
(Esther Eppie Lederer), left, and Dear Abby (Pauline Phillips,
aka Abigail Van Buren).

     Pauline was considerably more liberal than her sister, who wrote as "Ann Landers" and who frequently patted herself on the back for being liberal enough to endorse the first-in-the-nation decriminalization of homosexuality in her adopted state of Illinois in 1961 but who refused to concede that homosexuality was not a mental illness, not even in 1973 (see below clip; click on it to enlarge) as the psychiatric establishment was on the verge of discarding that designation. (Landers relented somewhat in 1992.)
     Below was her rationale that gays were maladjusted, stupidly based on the self-selected letters she got from discontents seeking advice, along with the excellent meat loaf recipe of her Omaha sister, which she had already made internationally famous and which was reprinted on the same day. (The only other recipe Ann Landers ever printed was for pound cake, which AKSARBENT has made several times; it is delicious, fattening and foolproof to prepare.)
     In private, Landers could be cheerfully crude. Her daughter, Margo, in a book about her mother, published a letter in which Landers referred to herself as "busier than a one-armed paper hanger with crabs." Several years ago, gay sex columnist Dan Savage purchased Ann Landers' Chicago Sun-Times office desk for $200 at an auction because he said he wanted to keep it in the advice business. He also snagged her IBM electric typewriter for another $175.

Click graphic to enlarge.