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!).
Heidi Alexander
When Rutgers Law Review Editor-in-Chief Heidi Alexander was in high school, she convinced her Minnesota district school board to create its first girls’ ice hockey team. Since then, she’s been committed to empowering low-income and minority women (as an entrepreneurship consultant at the non-profit Center for Women and Enterprise) and the LGBT community (by organizing efforts to legalize same-sex marriage in Massachusetts—mission accomplished). She holds the distinction of having been the youngest member of the Rhode Island Commission on Women, where she worked alongside elected officials to draft new legislation. Today, in New Jersey, she is a student and on-campus women’s rights advocate at Rutgers School of Law-Newark, and the first openly lesbian editor-in-chief of its prestigious Law Review. “LGBT rights advocates have successfully fought for greater protections for LGBT individuals under New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination,” says Alexander, who hopes to enact marriage equality in the Garden State. –KL
In no particular order…
