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!).
Ellen Huang
Queer Lounge Program Director Ellen Huang understands the challenge of breaking into the film industry, an especially difficult task for LGBT filmmakers, who face the compound obstacle of discrimination within an already-cutthroat business. Queer Lounge is a non-profit GLAAD media program that seeks to support and promote LGBT filmmakers. With its growing bank of celebrity and corporate endorsers, the Lounge is a gay hub at film festivals including Sundance and Toronto, providing filmmakers with networking opportunities and working to erode the stigma that only queer folks can relate to queer films. “If you can relate to superheroes and paratroopers in movies,” Huang insists, “you can relate to gay and lesbian film.” –MF
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