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Best. Lesbian. Week. Ever. (October 8, 2010): “The Real L Word,” Cynthia Nixon, Wanda Sykes, Constance McMillen

Christina Hendricks. The heterosexual Mad Men star finds it flattering when she’s hit on by women. You’re welcome!

Rules of Engagement. Sara Rue has been cast as a lesbian surrogate mom on the CBS sitcom. CBS president Nina Tassler promised we’d see more gay and lesbian characters on the notoriously gay-lite network this year. We should have known they’d be pregnant ones.

Sara Marcus. The writer has released Girls to the Front, the definitive book on the riot grrl movement. Can you turn a book up to 11?

Beth Ditto. The out singer/designer walked the runway in Jean Paul Gaultier’s Paris Fashion Show last weekend. Also, her new line for Evans is so fierce, we bet she’s making some girls who don’t fit into her clothes wish they could.

Kim Zolciak. The Real Housewives of Atlanta star calmly answered some silly questions from her frenemy NeNe about her sexual identity and her affair with a lesbian DJ, and do so without getting her wig in a twist. The lesbian elephant in the living room? NeNe’s unspoken crush on Kim and her obvious jealousy of said DJ!

John Mellencamp and Ozzy Osbourne. Both singers recently told anti-gay organizations to stop appropriating their songs. Mellencamp told NOM this his “views on same sex marriage and equal rights for people of all sexual orientations are at odds with NOM’s stated agenda.” Ozzy and family are “disgusted and appalled that the Westboro Baptist Church would use Ozzy’s music to represent such hateful and despicable beliefs.” That is the true spirit of rock n’ roll.

Cynthia Nixon. The out actress recently made the argument for gay marriage at the New Yorker Festival and co-hosted the Afghan Hands and Orlane Fundraiser for Afghan widows whose husbands were killed by the Taliban. If Fred Dalton Thompson can run for office, why shouldn’t she?

Wanda Sykes. The actress participated in a PSA about gay bullying for the We Give a Damn campaign and joined Kathy Griffin on Larry King Live to discuss the issue. We like having her on our team.

Kerry Washington. The actress says that she’s still working on the Dusty Springfield biopic with Kristin Chenoweth, in which they will play lovers. Washington said, “”Trust me. We want to make out with each other as much as people want us to make out with each other.” OK, Kerry, we trust you.

ABC Family. The network announced it is working on a TV movie about teen lesbian Constance McMillen, and they have two out producers working on it. Now, let’s discuss casting.

The Real L Word. The Showtime reality series about self-absorbed Los Angeles lesbians was renewed for a second season this week. Is any visibility better than no visibility? We’ll get back to you on that after we see the premiere episode of S2.

Qrushr. Nope, we’re still not having it.

ABC Family. The network has canceled Huge, an amazing show about a fat camp written by out lesbian Savannah Dooley and her mom, Winnie Holzman. Are you mad as hell and not going to take it anymore? Channel your rage over at Jezebel.com, where they’ve started a campaign to save the show.

Dancing with the Stars. Bi comic Margaret Cho got the boot this week, despite (or because of?) performing her “coming out as ourselves” samba while wearing a rainbow costume. The upside? Cho told Us, “I’ll be talking a lot about DWTS, drilling everyone a new one. It’s going to be awesome!”

Racial profiling. The touring band Girl in a Coma was stopped by agents because “they saw two Latinas in the front seats, the van had Texas plates, and was ‘full of luggage.'” Uh oh. Joan Jett isn’t going to like this one bit!

Karyme Lozano. The Mexican telenovela actress was crowned queen of San Francisco LGBT Pride in 2008. Now, she’s one of the celebrity supporters of the National Organization for Marriage-supported Vota Tus Valores (Vote Your Values) tour created to rally Latino voters’support for Carly Fiorina, the California candidate vying for Barbara Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat. Obviously, we’re going to need to get that crown back.

Patricia Dye. The 31-year-old woman (and does not identify herself as trans or male) posed as a teenage boy to entice underage girls to date her. She received six months in jail, and a lot of ill will from lesbian who don’t want that kind of visibility in the media.

Matthew Francis. One of two men accused of assaulting a gay patron at the historic Stonewall Inn in New York City claims that it’s obvious that he doesn’t hate gay people because his own sister is a “full-blown lesbian.” Would his homophobic assault have been half as brutal if his sister were bisexual?

The Westboro Baptist Church. In something completely out of character, the small fundamentalist group is still defending their right to picket the funerals of soldiers and gays. Now Margie Phelps has even quit her job as an administrator to fight for her right to be a jerk on a full-time basis. This means we can now officially ask her to quit her day job – and we mean the hateful, homophobic one.

The It Gets Worse campaign. According to our brother site, AfterElton.com, “The Lot Project wants gay teens to know that whatever torment they’re going through now – it only gets worse in hell, where they’ll face eternal damnation for their sinful homosexual lifestyle.”

On Wednesday, Ilene Chaiken was one of two speakers at the Out & Equal Workplace Summit’s Women in Leadership Luncheon, held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Chaiken delivered a speech about her career as a television executive in Hollywood, and how many obstacles she ran into when she was attempting to tell “gay stories” and “our stories.”

Upon taking the podium, she described her job as creator of The L Word as a “really sweet gig,” saying that she was going to discuss her journey there. “I knew I wanted to tell stories,” Chaiken said. “But I didn’t know what stories I had to tell.” She felt as though she was “intrinsically a storyteller,” and though she knew she was gay, she didn’t consider herself a “gay writer.” She considered herself a gay woman and a writer.

Chaiken said she wasn’t out until she had begun her career, serving as a “d-girl” (development girl), a term she noted is not in use much any more. But once she came out, she said she felt it was a gift; something gays and lesbians share as a common bond. “I think they’re missing out,” she said of straight people, eliciting laughs from the crowd.

“I tried before The L Word to tell gay stories,” Chaiken said, which began when she was working as an executive for Aaron Spelling. “I learned TV from him.” She notes that L Word viewers might see his influence in her work.

“The first story I put together was for a doctor show on ABC called Heartbeat,” she said, and some in the audience nodded in recognition. Chaiken went on to explain that she’d come up with the idea for a doctor show based on a real life medical office called the Women’s Medical Group, an OBGYN clinic ran by lesbians. And when she took the idea to Spelling, he loved it, accept there were to be some changes: There had to be men and only one of the woman could be a lesbian, but she was demoted to being a nurse practitioner.

“It wasn’t credited as I would have liked,” Chaiken said, also sharing that Gail Strickland played the character, who asked if she could come study Ilene and her partner at the time because she was so “daunted by the idea of playing a lesbian.” Chaiken notes that this was the first regular lesbian character on TV.

After that, Ilene went to work with Quincy Jones and helped create The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. But she felt frustrated by not having done what she truly wanted to do there, and locked herself in a room and wrote “an angry feminist action movie. “I was like a Phoenix rising from the ashes as a writer,” Chaiken said. This movie was Barb Wire, starring Pam Anderson, and it was, Chaiken said, much different from her original script.

“I had written a radical character – a butch sidekick that could have been transgender, but the producers said it was much too out there,” Chaiken said. “[The final product] was not the way I envisioned it.”

Gay stories took the back burner for a while, as Chaiken stayed behind the scenes working on other people’s shows. But she was approached by Disney to write a story about her coming out experience, to be called Story of Her Life. And Chaiken said, “Much of it you might recognize as Jenny’s story.”

And while it never came to fruition, Showtime invited Chaiken to get behind the film Dirty Pictures, a film about art and homophobia and Robert Mapplethorpe. Once it won a Golden Globe Award and proved to be successful, Chaiken said she felt she had developed a good relationship with Showtime that could be beneficial in the future.

Around this time, Chaiken penned a story for Los Angeles magazine about the gay and lesbian baby boom. It was featured on the cover and entitled “Lesbian mom chic: Hollywood redefines the family.” At the time, she and her partner had twin 2-year-old girls (they’re now 15) and she still wasn’t sure if she could translate her own life onto television, but decided to give it a go after the article.

She went to Showtime and pitched a series about lesbians, telling stories about her own circle of friends and family. The two women executives said that the “white man in the suit in the office down the hall” would never go for it, so she was turned down. But one year later, Queer as Folk debuted on the network.

Chaiken went back with what must have been an improved pitch, because Showtime bought it and she said, “It worked out fairly well.”

She told the audience that she’s sad the show has ended, but was ready for it to be over. Chaiken said that Showtime sees the franchise as having value, but is disheartened that there still aren’t gay women with their own shows, akin to a lesbian Cagney & Lacey or lesbian doctor, cop or comic book hero show. “There are only three lesbians on TV right now and four so-called bi woman,” Chaiken said, “and movies are just as bleak.” She went on to say that gay and lesbian writers and artists are some of the most brilliant, but they often put their own stories behind veils to get their films and shows made. She said we should all be using our resources and exercising our collective influence, relaying stats on lesbian and gay incomes and demographics. “We’re a desirable audience,” she said, and then said she was happy to announce that Showtime picked up the second season of The Real L Word, and that she’s also working on a pilot for CBS.

The lesbian community has differing feelings about Chaiken’s work on The L Word and it’s reality show spinoff, but her own real story, told that day, was one of the most entertaining I’ve ever heard from her. Hearing her talk about how Jenny Schecter’s story was based on her own life and coming out process, and how her radical feminist movie was transformed into a failed film about Pam Anderson wearing leather – well, it offered a little more insight into why The L Word turned into what it did.

Chaiken isn’t trying to win us over; she’s trying to get her story heard. Which means if you’re not Ilene or someone she knows, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll feel represented by her work. So if you can take anything away from her journey and experience in the industry, the message continues to be the same: create the change you want to see in the world. We can’t rely on anyone else, not even another lesbian, to do it for us.

– by Trish Bendix

Out actress Jane Lynch narrates the new film Bullied, which premiered this week in Washington, D.C. and will be made available for free to schools. It focuses on gay student Jamie Nabozny, who was abused and harassed in middle and high school and later sued his school for not protecting him. According to Lambda Legal, a federal appeals court eventually “issued the first judicial opinion in the nation’s history finding that a public school could be held accountable for not stopping antigay abuse.”

Watch the trailer for the film below:

The Nation has a list of The 50 Most Influential Progressives of the Twentieth Century, and lesbians Billie Jean King and Jane Addams made the list. Eleanor Roosevelt, made the list too, and you know what they say about her.

Check out our Great LezBritain interview with Lip Service creator Harriet Braun. The show premieres on October 12 at 10:30 pm on BBC Three, and our LezBritains, Sarah and Lee, will be recapping it for your reading pleasure.

Our own Lesley Goldberg talked with Heather Matarazzo for Echomag.com about how she came out. Don’t forget: Oct. 11 is National Coming Out Day.

The Butch Voices conference is happening in LA this weekend. You should go!

Lesbian contestants Kayla on America’s Next Top Model and Hayley Teal on X Factor Australia made the cut on their respective reality competition shows this week.

Stud Life, a “queer urban guerilla feature film about love and friendship,” is looking for funding. The film, written and directed by CampbellX and produced by Stella Nwimo and Nadya Kassam, will be shot in Great Britain this month. Described as “a post-modern queer She?s Gotta Have It for the YouTube generation,” the film is totally self-financed and they need to raise £15,000 for HD camera equipment including lens, lights and rig, location fees, transport, food, art department, hair and make-up and costumes. Lend your support at indiegogo.com/studlifemovie.

Another project looking for support is One Voice, Many Faces, a documentary for LGBTQ homeless youth. Check out their fundraising site to learn more about it.

“Cancer’s a Bitch,” the annual fundraiser for the National LGBT Cancer Network, will take place on Oct. 19, 2010 at La Mama Experimental Theater Club in NYC. The event stars Bitch and Eddie Sarfaty, and you can purchase tickets at the New York Charities website.

Movieline is wishing the NC-17 rating an unhappy 20th birthday by posting an overview of some of the films most burned by the restrictive rating, particularly those with LGBT themes. At the top of the list is the first movie ever rated NC-17, Henry and June (1990), about bisexual writer Anais Nin.

In honor of National Coming Out Day, comic Liz Feldman is bringing back her show, This Just Out, on Monday, OCt. 11 (Watch the promo for the first episode of the new season on Facebook.)

Hip-hop duo Kin4Life has a webseries streaming here.

Several of our AfterEllen.com contributors have written about gay bullying and the It Gets Better campaign, including Grace Chu, TheLinster, and Dorothy Snarker. Also, our Managing Editor Trish Bendix has an essay in the new book Dear John, I Love Jane.

Annette Bening will receive the Hollywood Actress Award at the Hollywood Film Festival’s Hollywood Awards gala, and her The Kids Are All Right co-star, Julianne Moore, will receive the Marcus Aurelius Award for lifetime achievement at the International Rome Film Festival.

The BBC Archive has released a new collection of material charting the emergence of the gay rights movement in the UK. This collection, released through the BBC Archive website, brings together TV and radio programs from news bulletins, documentaries and current affairs shows, which chart the political and social change in attitudes towards homosexuality over the past 50 years. Check it out at the BBC Archive website.

That’s it for this week! Got the inside scoop on a hot new lesbian/bi actor/musician/TV show/film? Tell us at [email protected]. Check back next Friday for another edition of Best. Lesbian. Week. Ever.

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