After carefully cocooning her personal life from the media during her 35 years playing Guiding Light's Holly Lindsey, actress Maureen Garrett has chosen National Coming Out Day to reveal publicly to Out magazine that she is a lesbian and has been involved in a 20-year-long relationship with her partner, Janet Morgan.
GL fans knew everything they could possibly want to know about Holly Lindsey and her life as the tortured object of Roger Thorpe's affections; however, information about the actress was scant. In a rare interview, Garrett admits that she has no webpage and no Facebook or Twitter accounts by design. Garrett is a very private person, and though her costars knew about her homosexuality, she'd kept it from the public, just as other actresses had done in the early 1990's.
As celebrities like Rosie O'Donnell and Ellen began outing themselves, Garrett once requested a same-sex love story from her network -- but the idea was shot down. That storyline was a decade too soon for writers to consider. Eventually, GL did write a lesbian love story for characters Olivia and Natalia.
Garrett decided to come out as a lesbian because she's no longer concerned about what people might think of her. She reveals that she and Morgan have raised three sons and one of Garrett's nieces.
Over the years, Garrett received fan mail indicating that viewers strongly identified with Holly's struggles; however, Garrett tells Out that she had very little in common with the character. "She wore far too much makeup," Garrett explained. "At the end of the day, I almost always washed off the makeup, and with it, Holly's brand of crazy."
At the end of GL in 2009, Garrett also washed off the desire to pursue onscreen acting. After spending time sculpting and writing, the 64-year-old returned to her theatrical roots by accepting a role in Ghost Writer.
Garrett took over the roll of Holly Lindsey in 1976 and portrayed the character for varying lengths of time until GL's final episode in 2009.
