Queer Women We Love, Red Hot Entrepreneurs, Wonder Women

Workin’ It 2011

September 19, 2011 Liz Gold

The Real L Word fans know Romi Klinger from her spot on the Showtime reality series, but this Pasadena, Calif.-born jewelry designer has lived a best-seller life since growing up in the care of two mothers and a father. Our cover girl has been a successful makeup artist, an apothecary buyer for Kitson, a co-creator of the famed lesbian event company PYT and a blogger at tenderomi.com. This year, Klinger and Vanessa Salazar founded HIJA Por Vida, a jewelry and accessories line exclusively sold through Love and Pride. Now solo, Klinger is moving forward with Casa Por Vida, her own jewelry brand inspired by Mexican and Native American designs. Her Web site, casaporvida.com, launches this month. “The best part of owning my own business is that I’m my own boss and I get a chance to do what I love,” Klinger says. “We make all these items by hand on our living room floors. So far, we’ve lost a lot of sleep—but, we’re hustlers and hard-workers. The fact is, when you believe in your product, work is a pleasure.”

2011’s Red Hot Entrepreneurs

This innovative trio’s collective experience ranges from behind-the-scenes production to the largest of stages, venues and screens. Sara Croce (left, co-founder of Geek Goddess Productions) produced an online scripted series about a pair of female bounty hunters called Skip Trace, while Haviland Stillwell (center, Broadway star of Fiddler on the Roof and Les Miserables) and Ashley Reed (right, lead singer and drummer in Plutonic Lovers) are the co-founders of Lighter Entertainment, a production company with its first feature scheduled to shoot this fall. All three are the brains behind the sidesplitting new Web series Unicorn Plan-It (distributed on Autostraddle.com) about a lesbian event planning company in L.A. They refer to everyone as unicorns because, as everybody knows, unicorns are really just lesbian horses. “It’s amazing to be able to work with who we want to work with, make what we want to make, and be our own bosses,” Croce says. “We can depend on [this project] to always be collaborative and rewarding.”