6 and Sittin’ Pretty
In a curious, on-air incident this October, lesbian uber-icon Ellen DeGeneres began weeping over the custody of her former pet, Iggy, whom she and partner Portia de Rossi had adopted from the Mutts and Moms animal shelter. When Iggy failed to mesh with the couple’s cats, DeGeneres gave him to her hairdresser. Then the shelter stepped in and took Iggy back, citing a contract DeGeneres had signed to return the dog to Mutts and Moms in the event that she couldn’t keep him. Thus her bout of televised tears as she implored the shelter to return the hound to the hairdresser. Mutts and Moms did not acquiesce.
On the upshot, DeGeneres won her third consecutive Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Talk Show Host in June 2007. The Ellen DeGeneres Show also won Best Direction in a Talk Show and Best Art Direction.
Our Sixth Year In Review!
A Year of Queer TV
We’re here, we’re queer, and it seems that we’re taking over the airwaves. Gay-specific networks here! TV and Logo continued to break new ground this year: here!’s Dante’s Cove just kept moving more gay goth girls into the vampire-infested hotel, while Logo premiered The Big Gay Sketch Show along with the first lesbian reality show, Curl Girls, and the first lesbian sitcom, Exes & Ohs. Reality TV was, however, the most fertile breeding ground for Sapphic storylines. On Bravo, Jackie Warner’s still flexing on Workout, and Top Chef featured three lesbian contestants: Lisa Fernandes, Jennifer Biesty and Zoe Antonitsas. MTV hit one out of the park with A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, which sped Dani Campbell into the spotlight as America’s favorite “futch,”and our beloved Top Model Kim Stolz is still on the tube as an MTV News correspondent. In the realm of fiction, there’s real-life lesbian Portia de Rossi playing a gay mom on FX’s Nip/Tuck, which features two other lesbian charcters, one of whom is played by Rosie O’Donnell (also gay, in case you didn’t know). On Showtime, besides another steamy season of The L Word, we have TV’s youngest lesbian, Isabelle, on Weeds. NBC brought us a closeted Texas mayor on Friday Night Lights, but even more surprising is ABC’s revolutionary casting of a transgender woman (Candis Cayne) in a recurring role on the primetime hit Dirty Sexy Money. When it comes to TV, it seems gay’s the new way.
