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!).
Amber Hollibaugh
Amber Hollibaugh is out to change the world. As Senior Strategist for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Hollibaugh has long been at the frontlines of the LGBT rights movement. She was the first director of the Lesbian AIDS Project at Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and her documentary, The Heart of the Matter, won the 1994 Sundance Festival Freedom of Expression Award. She is a founding board member of Queers for Economic Justice, and has also worked for Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE), the country’s first national organization for LBGT seniors. Says Hollibaugh, “The kind of work that I do is really driven by a profound sense that the world is not the way I want it to be.” –LL
In no particular order…
