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!).
Helen Zia
“I believe we can all be agents for positive social change, and that’s how I try to lead my life as a writer and an activist—to give voice to LGBTs, people of color, women and other marginalized communities,” says groundbreaking journalist and formidable scholar Helen Zia. Zia was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the CUNY School of Law for bringing important legal and civil rights matters into public view. Her book Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People has been quoted twice by Bill Clinton. “The biggest emotion,” she says of her stint as torch bearer at the Olympic Torch Relay in San Francisco, “was not so much [carrying] the torch itself, but the [impact of] thousands of demonstrators and the police.” –JB
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