Rosie speaks out. Finally.

Would the media giant Gruner & Jahr have decided to sue Rosie O’Donnell over the downfall of Rosie magazine if same-sex marriage were legal? Bizarre as it might sound, Rosie believes the answer is no, and her explanation is both fascinating and plausible.

"If you are a heterosexual talk show host and you’re sued by a major corporation, anything you have said to your husband is privileged information," she said in an interview on my radio program on Sirius OutQ last week. She was referring to two rights of marriage that few of us ever think about–until we’re sued for $100 million, or brought to court for something far minor. One is the spousal immunity privilege, which, if you watch enough Law & Order or The Practice, you know means that, in general, a husband cannot be compelled to testify against his wife and vice versa. The other is known as the privilege for marital communications, which protects confidential correspondence between spouses. These are just two of hundreds of rights granted by marriage–rights that gay couples don’t have.

"If you are a homosexual talk show host," O’Donnell continued, "and you’re sued by a corporation, anything you have ever said and/or written to your spouse/partner/wife is allowed to be entered into the record. It is totally unfair."

She believes that Gruner & Jahr’s lawyers were well aware of that inequity and exploited it to their advantage.

"Any and every thing I wrote to [my partner] Kelli, you know, which they were using against me, some of my essays–you know, when you get into a deep, dark place and you say, ‘You know what honey, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ Well, if the honey is the same sex as you, that is evidence in a trial, and that’s hard to believe in America… And if they didn’t have access to some of those letters I wrote to Kelli, I don’t think they would have sued me. Because, innately, what they were thinking was that I would rather give them money than show the truth of my darkest part to America…"

But if that were the case, the company was wrong in its assessment, as O’Donnell didn’t back down and called their bluff. A judge indicated last month that he didn’t think damages were in order.

The affair turned her into a promoter of same-sex marriage, though she’d previously been on the fence. "Never in my wildest dreams, if you said to me you’re going to become an advocate for gay marriage, I’d say you’re on crack," she told me. "But frankly, you need to be legally protected as a family, and my family was not legally protected."

Now Rosie’s gone from the "queen of nice" who never talked about her Sapphic desires, to a crusader for gay adoption, a promoter of same-sex marriage and the producer of Taboo, the queerest play to hit Broadway in years. Along the way, she’s been brutally attacked (almost as harshly as Taboo has been ripped apart by the critics) and ridiculed for shedding her former sweetness for the role of loudmouth dyke. Some of the nastiest barbs, particularly about her "bitch" demeanor, have come from gay male writers and theater critics (some of them circumspect about their own sexuality), thereby furthering the worst stereotypes about gay men as mincing misogynists.

I say this as someone who was one of Rosie’s vocal detractors in the days when she was pining about Tom Cruise on her talk show. I have also been cynical on several occasions in this column about her media-managed coming out last year, which seemed designed to garner maximum exposure for her book. More than that, she appeared to deny the fact that she’d ever been closeted, and generally sloughed off the importance of coming out.

Those were pretty good grounds for criticism. But now that she’s gone public, has admitted in the Advocate that she should have come out sooner and become outspoken on gay political issues–not to mention her regular skewering of George W. Bush–why are some gay men attacking her even more fiercely than before? Are they embarrassed by her abrasiveness?

It’s funny, but as she’s coarsened in the mainstream, Rosie’s become far more tender toward gay people. When I criticized her last year following her high-profile coming out, she called me a "moron." We eventually exchanged heated emails, and soon even met for lunch–take-out spinach salads in her office–during the last few weeks of her talk show. It was one of those impassioned conversations between two New Yorkers with big traps, and it didn’t settle anything. But over the next few months Rosie went through a transformation, one that a lot of people go through when they finally bust out of the closet.

"Kelli and I went to P-town [Provincetown, MA] for the first time after the show ended," she said last week. "And I was amazed at the place... I got this feeling of community from the gay community that I hadn’t really felt ever, because I really didn’t get to do what normal people do when they come out… I do think that my pleasure in being involved in the gay community now is…huge."

She’s since given a hundred grand to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, visited the kids at the Harvey Milk High School for Gay Youth and donated $25,000 to the school. She emceed the Hetrick-Martin Institute’s Emery Awards a couple of weeks ago and she continues to advocate on the issue of gay adoption. Now she’s taking up the cause of same-sex marriage at a time when the right wing is pushing a federal marriage amendment and the Democrats are running scared.

Hell, she’s even saying some nicer things about us morons.

"You’ve been a very interesting guy to get to know and I want to thank you very much," she said on my show. "Just remember this: A lot of gay boys don’t play on sports teams, so they don’t know that when somebody’s sitting on the bench, in uniform, they’re still on your team, even though they’re not scoring the points. So don’t hurt them."

Okay, I get the point. I’m just glad she’s off the bench now, and stepping up to the plate.