100 WOMEN WE LOVE 2008
Lily Tomlin’s extraordinary career as a funny lady bloomed on the TV show Laugh-In in 1969, the year of the Stonewall rebellion. Fittingly, she has woven feminism and LGBT life into her characters—the not-so-hardworking phone operator Ernestine, Violet Newstead in 9 to 5 and the numerous personas populating The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, the one-woman play written by Tomlin’s partner Jane Wagner, for which Tomlin won a Tony Award. She was also nominated for an Academy Award for her turn as Linnea Reese in Robert Altman’s Nashville, played recurring roles on TV shows from Murphy Brown to The West Wing, and has won six Emmys, a Grammy, and a Lifetime Achievement Tony Award in 1977. Tomlin, who has called Wagner the most influential person in her life and career, narrated 1995’s landmark LGBT documentary The Celluloid Closet. –KL
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Hats off to the 100 Women We Love, class of 2008 (in no particular order, ’cause we love ’em all!).
Katherine Linton
In 1993, producer Katherine Linton was hired to host a new PBS program, In the Life. When the pioneering gay news program’s original producer quit, Linton landed that job as well. “I learned everything on the ground,” she says of television production. “From there, that’s all I’ve been doing.” Her company, Linton Media, produces documentaries, including Lesbian Sex and Sexuality for here! TV, AIDS: A Pop Culture History for VH1 and The Junkie Next Door: Women and Heroin for A&E. “My company is committed to progressive, majority-queer issues, and I’d like to keep it going.” says Linton, who has learned a lot from her projects about lesbian sex. “I didn’t know the girls were as busy as they are!” –LL
In no particular order…
