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
In no particular order…
Hats off to the 100 Women We Love, class of 2008 (in no particular order, ’cause we love ’em all!).
Ann Bannon
In the 1950s, when Ann Bannon sat down at her typewriter to draft Odd Girl Out, the first book in a series of lesbian pulp novels, she imagined her books would end up with the rest of cheap reads of her day—in the trash bin. But in a time before indie queer film, women’s festivals, The L Word and LOGO, Bannon learned that “women had been saving these books in their garages,” finding in them a rare, printed reflection of their own lives, whether real or imagined. Bannon’s tales of the steamy love triangle between Laura, Beth and uber-butch Beebo have reincarnated as The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, a theatrical adaptation that opened this year to critical acclaim at New York’s 37 Arts Theater. The secret to her success: “writing about lesbians and gay men the best that I could, the most honestly.” –JB
In no particular order…
