Lesbians In The News

[Kobi]

Lily Tomlin Marries Jane Wagner After 42 Years Together

Show-stopping actress and comedian Lily Tomlin and her partner of 42 years, Jane Wagner, were married in a private ceremony in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve, Tomlin's rep confirmed to PEOPLE on Tuesday.

"They're very happy," says the spokesperson, Jennifer Allen.

Besides their relationship, the couple's many celebrated collaborations, written by Wagner, include Tomlin's Tony-winning one-woman show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, which played on Broadway, toured and was filmed for the screen, as well as the movie The Incredible Shrinking Woman.

Wagner, 78, was born and raised in Morristown, Tennessee. Tomlin, 74, is from Detroit. It has been reported that the two met when Tomlin was looking for a collaborator to help her develop the character of the wicked child Edith Ann.
As profiled in PEOPLE in 1976, just as Tomlin was branching out from TV's Laugh-In into an impressive film career, "Lily put in time as a premed student at Detroit's Wayne State University but she never lost her childhood zest for showing off in front of an audience. That led to club dates in New York, a spectacular stretch on Laugh-In, more TV specials and an Oscar nomination for her role in the film Nashville."

Ten years later, in 1988, PEOPLE, in another love letter to Tomlin, wrote: "Real is the word for Lily. … Usually she collaborates with her best friend … writer Jane Wagner. When they're not on the road, Lily says, home is 'a big old pink stucco house in L.A. that used to belong to W.C. Fields. It's casual, airy, light, very feminine, a soft house.' "

The story also said, "Lily speaks about Jane with great warmth. 'We share similar feelings about people and about the world. She's able to verbalize it and I'm able to physicalize it. She writes satirically but tenderly, and she loves farce and black comedy and broad slapstick. When you put all this together and make an audience laugh and be moved, it's just glorious.' "

News of their marriage was first reported by the veteran columnist Liz Smith, who wrote, "[M]y longtime friends, Lily Tomlin and her love, the writer Jane Wagner, got married on the eve of 2014. ... My wish is that their happiness will be as great as their combined talents."


http://www.people.com/people/article...ntent=My+Yahoo

[Kobi]

NEW YORK (WOMENSENEWS)-- These days, Alix Dobkin passes most of her time taking care of her three young grandchildren, picking up the two oldest from elementary school in Woodstock, N.Y., and playing with the youngest, a 4-year-old, at home.

Every once in a while, though, the 73-year-old renowned folk singer still drives down to New York City to play a concert and temporarily recreate a once thriving underground urban community of lesbians, whose bonds were cemented by folk music and softball games.

Dobkin is at the center of a network of 1970s-era lesbian feminists who still gather regularly. From patriarchy to lesbianism they have plenty to talk about. But it is hard to escape the notion of a heyday now past.

"Well, nothing is like it was, including us," Dobkin said. "We are older and we are tireder and there have also been huge changes in the environment in which we live."

From a 1996 Supreme Court ruling against workplace discrimination to a decision in June 2013 against the Defense of Marriage Act, the legal terrain has been improving in recent years for people who identify as lesbian and gay.

But for Dobkin, co-director of Old Lesbians Organizing for Change, a national network with biannual forums, there are still plenty of reasons to get together. The fight for marriage equality marks a victorious, forward step in "normalizing lesbians and gays in the mainstream," she said, but it is not a key issue that has inspired her.

At meetings members discuss their experiences as older lesbians, plan events and team up with larger national groups, including SAGE, which is focused on LGBT people over the age of 60. In July, Old Lesbians Organizing for Change, which is open to lesbians over 60, will be holding a forum in Oakland, Calif., that is expected to attract several hundred women from across the United States and also abroad.

Old Lesbians Organizing for Change is the only national organization that speaks out against the unique isolation and discrimination old lesbians often encounter, said Jan Griesinger, a co-director of the group. Members of the 15 chapters of the organization walk in annual gay pride parades and tend to elicit surprise when they flash their banners displaying the word "Old."

"Ageism is primarily about one being treated like you are old and old means out of it, clueless, and you can't really remember anything," Griesinger said. "It especially affects women. People pat you on the head and call you honey and sweetie."

25-Year-Old Organization

Old Lesbians Organizing for Change was founded in 1989, six years after the publication of "Look Me in the Eye," an influential series of essays on aging, lesbianism and feminism by the writer Barbara McDonald. It formed on the heels of a waning period of political activism among lesbian feminists, who had begun to exchange sit-ins and collectives for steady jobs and family life.

Elana Dykewomon went to her first meeting of the organization shortly after she turned 60 with her partner, eight years her senior. There she found the cohort she never realized she had been missing.

In the 1970s Dkyewomon came out as a lesbian separatist and established an organizing space called Lesbian Gardens in North Hampton, Mass. She surrounded herself with other lesbians in the center's feminist book store and coffee house, and planned sit-ins and marches such as early "Take Back the Night" demonstrations that have been raising awareness of gender-based violence ever since.

But eventually Dykewomon, an English professor at San Francisco State University, went back to school and started spending less time protesting in the streets.

At Old Lesbians Organizing for Change forums Dykewomon sometimes feels a semblance of the 1970s, a heady time of collective activism and identity formation for lesbian feminists in the United States.

"When I went to that first gathering, it was like, 'Here they are. Here are the women who still want to be activists and kick ass and change the world,'" Dykewomon said.

Griesinger, the 71-year-old co-director of the organization, said that despite a nostalgic tendency among some in her age group, the lesbian feminist movement has remained strong and vital.

"Every day, every decade from the 1970s there was activity," Griesinger said. "The movement has changed and shifted, but there are women's centers and programs and community and meetings and just many, many activities going on all the time."

Fertilized by 1960s Movement

Lesbian feminism of the 1970s was fertilized by the feminist movement in the late 1960s, said Leila Rupp, a professor of feminist studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. At sit-ins across the country, activists challenged injustices affecting all women. But they also flagged the special concerns of lesbians, such as workplace discrimination and court rulings that denied lesbians legal guardianship of their children.

"Lesbians were the backbone of the radical feminist movement," Rupp said. "One of the big issues is that women were losing their children in custody cases and their jobs in the workplace and that was very real. People were making choices about how they were going to be out and where they were going to be."

The women formed a scattered national underground community, with New York City as a nucleus. Regular softball games in New York offered women a chance to be physical and competitive with one another. Folk musicians performed in apartments and at bars. Larger gatherings at university grounds could draw, at their height, up to 1,000 women. Those early years were a whirlwind, a thrill a minute, as old lesbians now remember.

Trying to organize these same women decades later presents particular problems, Dykewomon has found. They tend to be more forgetful and have more health crises.

The upcoming forum, which Dykewomon is helping to stage, will include a memorial for deceased lesbians, as well as workshops and a dance show.

New members can join Old Lesbians Organizing for Change once they exit their 50s, but recruitment is an ongoing struggle.

Arden Eversmeyer, who came out as a lesbian in 1948 when she was 17 years old, is a former co-director of Old Lesbians Organizing for Change. The organization has since provided funding for Eversmeyer's initiative, the Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project.

Over the past 16 years Eversmeyer has recorded and collected the oral histories of 350 lesbians. Most of these women -- the oldest one was born in 1916 -- have been closeted for much of their adult lives. Some were married to men for periods of time and had children. Eversmeyer said she is quick to accept when she gets turned down for an oral history interview request.

"That is a generational thing, you know," Eversmeyer said. "Why should they come out now? They spent their lives with this kind of protective cover, and why should they risk losing some friends, or family, or church connections when they are safe the way they are?"

Older Lesbians More Reluctant

Older women seem more reluctant than men to show up at gatherings focused on their sexual orientation.

The SAGE Center in Manhattan, N.Y., the first full-time LGBT senior center in the United States, offers some older lesbian and bisexual women in New York City a chance to meet other LGBT people and participate in free events like writing workshops and meditation classes. But even here, at the open, bright meeting space, far fewer women than men turn out for the evening communal dinners. The seven women who arrived for the weekly group "Our Evolving Lives" one recent Thursday were reluctant to offer their names to a visitor.

"Most of the women are out, but not all, and we have had some women just coming out, even a woman over 70," said Felicia Sobel, a 69-year-old social worker who leads two women's groups.

None of the women in this group had heard of Old Lesbians Organizing for Change. The topic at hand during their two-hour session in a small classroom one floor down from SAGE's busy lobby was monogamy. "It is a very religious way to live if you just stay with one person and I don't think it is workable, frankly," said a woman who identified herself as Raquel Welch.

Some older lesbians say their lives today are not that different from decades ago. Griesinger, for instance, lives on a women's collective in Athens, Ohio, that she founded in the 1980s and said her work has never let up.

Dobkin, meanwhile, is preparing for her next concert on March 8 in Manhattan at People's Voice Cafe, in Midtown East. Dobkin has earned the admiration of such big stars as pop singer Melissa Etheridge and Bob Dylan, who once called her his "favorite female singer."

"The ways we would organize back then just aren't there now," Dobkin said. "But people still come out to my shows and I think about coming together now and what a charge it is. The charge of being connected, of belonging to such a powerful force. Of being together."



http://womensenews.org/story/lesbian...m#.Us0miZ0o63Y

[Kobi]

Who she is: The acclaimed author of novels including Room and Hood, works of literary history such as Passions Between Women and We Are Michael Field, and short-story collections including Kissing the Witch and The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits.

What she’s accomplished: Emma Donoghue, born in Ireland and now living in Canada, is one of the most esteemed writers working today. Her best-known work is the 2010 novel Room, whose story is told from the viewpoint of a 5-year-old boy who has spent his entire life in a small room with his mother and knows nothing of the outside world except what he gets from television. It may sound harrowing, but on her website, Donoghue emphasizes that “Room is no horror story or tearjerker, but a celebration of resilience and the love between parent and child.” It has sold over a million copies worldwide, been translated into 35 languages, and won numerous awards. A film adaptation is planned, with Donoghue writing the screenplay and Lenny Abrahamson directing.

The fame of Room, however, shouldn’t overshadow the rest of Donoghue’s extensive body of work. The author, who is a lesbian, has often dealt with lesbian themes. Her first novel, Stir-Fry, is a coming-of-age tale about a girl from rural Ireland who moves to Dublin for college and unwittingly moves in with a lesbian couple. Her second, Hood, is a story of love and loss involving two women who began their romance as students in the repressive atmosphere of a Dublin convent school in the late 1970s.

Among her nonfiction work, Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature deals with just that, while Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801 is a survey of texts on lesbian themes in that setting, encompassing trial records, newspapers, medical tracts, poems, novels, plays, and more. We Are Michael Field is a biography of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, aunt and niece as well as lovers, who wrote under the pseudonym Michael Field in the Victorian era.

Donoghue has published many collections of short fiction, such as The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, with stories based on, as she says on her website, “peculiar incidents in the history of the British Isles” and written “using both scholarly and imaginative methods to resurrect long-forgotten women, queers, troublemakers, freaks and other nobodies.” Kissing the Witch, another collection, reimagines fairy tales from a feminist perspective. Donoghue’s short fiction has appeared in many anthologies, and she has also written plays, articles on literary history, and more.

Her latest book is Frog Music, due out April 1. This is her first venture into crime fiction, and it tells the story of a woman in 1876 San Francisco investigating the murder of a friend. Says an advance review from Publishers Weekly: “Donoghue’s first literary crime novel is a departure from her bestselling Room, but it’s just as dark and just as gripping.”

Donoghue says she moved to Canada for “love of a Canadian” — partner Chris Roulston, a professor of women’s studies and feminist research at the University of Western Ontario. The two women live in London, Ont., with their son and daughter. Another noteworthy fact about Donoghue’s famly is that her father, Denis Donoghue, is a literary critic, New York University professor emeritus, and scholar of the work of T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and others. Emma, the youngest of Denis and Frances Donoghue’s eight children, is the only one to follow him into a literary career.

Choice quote, on whether she minds being known as a lesbian writer: “I’m not going to object to ‘lesbian writer’ if I don’t object to ‘Irish writer’ or ‘woman writer,’ since these are all equally descriptive of me and where I’m from. And the labels commit me to nothing, of course; my books aren’t and don’t have to be all about Ireland, or women, or lesbians. (And since publishing Room, I’m mostly known as the locked-up-children writer instead…).” — Donoghue in the FAQs section of her website

For more information: The author’s official site, EmmaDonoghue.com, is a treasure trove of info.

http://www.shewired.com/who-f/2014/0...-emma-donoghue

[Kobi]

Billie Jean King is a badass lady. President Obama knew it when he selected her to represent the U.S. and LGBT people as a delegate for the Sochi Olympics, and after her appearance Tuesday on The Colbert Report, the rest of America does too.

Despite the fact that her appearance in Russia could be considered "gay propaganda," which is illegal in Russia, King tells Stephen Colbert that she won't stay quiet if questioned. When reminded that she could be thrown in jail for supposedly promoting homosexuality, she responds with "I guess I'll have to take that chance." Game, set, match, Billie Jean King.

Watch the full interview on The Colbert Report here:

[tapu]

Just watched the SF Fire Chief apologize for the way FD approached the Asiana flight. Not too many lesbians in that high of a position let themselves look THAT butch lesbian. Cool.

[Kobi]

We’re so happy for out comic and Chelsea Lately Roundtable regular Fortune Feimster for landing a an acting gig in Fox’s upcoming comedy Cabot College, produced by none other than Tina Fey (and Matt Hubbard).

Fortune is set to star as Becca, a popular, openly gay student at the fictional women’s college that has just gone co-ed, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “The character is a three-sport varsity athlete who is an outgoing, extremely loud and raucous partier,” THR reports.

Chelsea Lately fans never fear though. While Fortune has stepped away from her regular writing role on the talk show, she will remain a regular on the roundtable.

The comic behind hilarious alter-egos like Darlene Witherspoon the Hooters waitress and her spot-on portrayal of both Honey Boo Boo and Mama June, was slated to write, produce and star in the half-hour comedy Discounted for ABC back in 2012, but it never came to fruition.

Congrats to Fortune for teaming up with Fey!

[lamuymuyfem]

Gigi Chao, daughter of a Chinese billionaire, has been in conflict with her father since marrying her oh-so-butch partner in 2012.

He has offered any man the equivalent of $114 million if he is able to 'turn his daughter straight.'

Gigi's most recent response is an open letter to her father in which she tells him that she is not simply a 'baby machine.'

You are amazing - thanks for being willing to be so high profile (and high femme)!

La Muy Muy Fem

[Kobi]

Following the publication of an open letter from his lesbian daughter Gigi yesterday, Hong Kong billionaire Cecil Chao has withdrawn his multi-million dollar offer to any man that can successfully woo her, CNN reports:

ChaoCecil Chao, a wealthy real estate developer, made headlines around the world in 2012 when he offered 500 million Hong Kong dollars (roughly $65 million) to any man who succeeded in marrying his daughter.
$64M to marry my gay daughter

Recent reports that he was willing to double the offer put his family back in the headlines...

..."If Gigi's said that this is what she chooses, then it's all over," Cecil Chao said Thursday an interview with CNN's Monita Rajpal. He said the huge sum he had offered to potential suitors "stays in my pocket."

But the 77-year-old tycoon, who has three children but has never married, is unable to embrace his daughter's love life.

"I can't say I am happy with her choice," he said. "If this is her choice then it's for her."

And he said he wouldn't be welcoming Eav, 46, into his family, despite his daughter's plea.

http://www.towleroad.com/2014/01/cec...hter-gigi.html

[Kobi]

Mathematically, we know there are definitely more LGBT athletes heading to Sochi, Russia, than there are on this list. But after a few weeks of digging, asking around, and Googling, the crop of out athletes heading to Sochi for the Olympics includes, it seems, only five people. All five are women.

Conversely, by the time the 2012 games in London were over, there were about 25 athletes (and a coach) who were out. London is a safer place to be LGBT than Russia, where violence against LGBT people is growing by the day and a law is on the books barring so-called gay propaganda.

We'll be watching Team LGBT as the games play out, and we're hoping the roster grows in the days ahead. In the meantime, here's who we will be watching.

Belle Brockhoff, Australia

When Russia banned LGBT "propaganda," 20-year-old Australian snowboarding prodigy Belle Brockhoff leaped out of the closet.

"I want to be proud of who I am and be proud of all the work I've done to get into the Olympics and not have to deal with this law," Brockhoff said last year.

Since then she said the Australian Olympic Committee has supported her journey to the games, though she said they didn't recommend she wave around a rainbow flag. Even as she's gearing up for Sochi, Brockhoff recently said, "After I compete, I'm willing to rip on [Putin's] ass. I'm not happy and there's a bunch of other Olympians who are not happy either."

Anastasia Bucsis, Canada

Bucsis was out at the last Winter Olympic games in Vancouver, but only a few months after Russia passed its antigay law, she reiterated that she was "proud to be gay."

“I could never promote that message of concealing who you are with all of this going on in Russia. I’m kind of happy that I did it on my own terms,” the long-track speed skater said.

Bucsis, who competed in the 2010 Vancouver Games, grew up in Calgary, the site of the 1988 Winter Olympic games. She said growing up in the wake of the Calgary Olympics inspired her, spurring her parents to get her to begin speed skating. Being closeted and not knowing any other speed skaters affected her performance in 2010, where she competed in the 500-meter event. She came out with the support of teammate Kaylin Irvine and now looks forward to Sochi's Olympic games. She's on the Canadian national team and has set a personal record this year.

Sanne Van Kerkhof, Netherlands

Short track competitor Sanne Van Kerkhof, has been on the Dutch national team, and competed in 2010 in the women's relay. Since Vancouver, Van Kerkhof seems to have hit her stride as a member of the relay team, as the Dutch women have won gold at the European Championships four years in a row since 2011 as well as the World Championships last year. She is part of the Dutch team that will be tackling the 3,000-meter relay.


Barbara Jezeršek, Slovenia

At the 2010 Winter Olympics, cross-country skier Barbara Jezeršek competed in the 10-kilometer and 15-kilometer races, as well as the 4x5-kilometer relay. She will be in Sochi representing Slovenia on the slopes.

Ireen Wüst, Netherlands

Speed skater Ireen Wüst won the gold for the Netherlands in 2010 in the women's 1,500-meter race at age 23, and four years earlier she won her first gold medal in the 3,000-meter speed skating event at the 2006 Olympic games in Torino, Italy. Now she's ready to hit the ice again for Team Orange in five events.

"I’ve skated for a long time now, and I competed in the last two Winter Games, so I know what to expect and I know how to race," she said to the International Olympic Committee recently. "Everyone has their own way, but for me I need to find the balance between being really focused and being relaxed. If I’m too nervous, I won’t be able to achieve my goal as it affects my body. I have to be relaxed, but focused; that’s what I prepare for mentally."

http://www.advocate.com/sports/2014/...o-gay-olympics

[~baby~doll~]

http://lesbiannews.com/

Many Married Utah Same-Sex Couples Can File Joint State Tax Returns
by Lesbian News • January 16, 2014

According to new guidance issued by the Utah State Tax Commission, all same-sex couples living in Utah that are eligible to file a joint federal tax return for the 2013 tax year are also eligible to file a joint state tax return.

While supporters of the state’s ban on marriage equality have appealed to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to defend the law, the USTC determined that all Utah same-sex marriages performed in 2013 are recognized for the purposes of state income tax filings.

So, if you live in Utah, and got married there in 2013—or, if you got married somewhere else—you may want to speak with a tax professional about your unique needs. You can peruse the state’s guidance here.

Lesbian news is a great site for information.