AE: Where are you at with Season 2?
GT: Ilene is directing the season finale this week. We finished the official writing in June, but the nature of TV is that there is a lot of changing. My job is done unless I’m up there acting, but Ilene called me in late summer and said “Please come up and brainstorm with me, because we have to make these radical changes to the end of the season.” So then it was a whirlwind of 10 days of writing, writing, writing, and then I’m done again.

The process has become easier this season, because we already know the characters and the actors, and what they can do.

AE: Ilene mentions in her pilot commentary on the DVD that several of Bette and Tina's insemination-related scenes are loosely based on her own experiences. Are there any stories in the first season that are based on your life?
GT: Lisa the lesbian-identified man is based on a story I heard about a guy who was so lesbian-identified that he was mad he wasn’t allowed into the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. That whole character came about because I was trying to explain to some of the staff what the Festival was, and in the process I mentioned this guy Lisa. And the executive producer was like “A dude named Lisa? I love it! Let’s make him a character.” That’s sort of the way characters evolve.

That’s what fun about my job—just talking to lesbians gives me ideas. Although people do say to me “If I see that on The L Word, I’m going to kick your ass!”

AE: What was your inspiration for the Dinah Shore episode?
GT: The whole idea for the Dinah Shore episode came about because I had been there for the first time the year before, and I thought “this scene is so intense and so lesbo, it would be great to do an episode about it.” I always had this idea about Dinah Shore that it was this older lesbian, golf getaway for couples, but when I was there, I was like, “This is Spring Break!” There were women racing through the halls with beer at 4 A.M., and I thought “That’s fun! That would make great TV!”

Funny story: I wrote that episode and Rose directed it, and when we went to shoot background scenes at the event, Rose was walking around filming, and at some point I was dancing and suddenly I heard “Guin! You can’t be in the scene!” Then later, it turned out that I was Gabby, and we thought, well, Gabby would be there, so it was okay. So if you look closely on the DVD, you’ll see that I’m dancing in one of the group party scenes.

AE: What was your favorite scene in the first season?
GT: The scene where Kelly Lynch sings the Leonard Cohen song to Kit. I just loved how Kelly inhabited that character, and how Pam as a straight woman tried to keep the boundaries, but there was this sweet romance between them…And Kelly’s just hot in her boy drag. We all just loved Kelly, and Ivan, and we immediately wanted to know how many scenes Kelly could do.

One of my other favorite scenes is Alice’s flashback in the Dinah Shore episode, about how she first fell in love with a girl. I can completely attribute that to Leisha Hailey’s genius; I think it’s so funny. I'll confess that that wasn’t what I originally had as a flashback for Alice—it was originally her and a girl at a football game, under the bleachers. The joke of that scene was that they’re really drunk and they make out, and then the girl pukes on her.

AE: Alice’s mom mentioned that story in the car…
GT: Yeah, that was the vestige of what was written. But Leisha really wanted to do a musical thing so we just rewrote it for her, and it worked so beautifully.

AE: All of the coming-out flashbacks were really good…
GT: They were really fun to write. We were worried initially that you wouldn’t know the characters well enough yet to really care about their coming-out stories, but I think it turned out well.

AE: Are there any scenes you’d do differently if you could go back and rewrite them?
GT: I always wanted the Lisa character to be more goth, anarchy, punk-like, and less like the soft, crunchy type Lisa sort of bled into, like the male nanny that Freddie Prinze Jr. played on Friends. Because I think Lisa ended up seeming more like a scammer, rather than someone who was coming from a genuine place. So I would have rewritten that.

And in the episode where Jenny goes on a roadtrip and does mushrooms, there was something about the kid she was with—in my head, he was younger and more vulnerable, but the actor played him so huge that it came off goofy, when it was supposed to come off more sweet. But that's what I’ve learned in writing for TV: there’s so much that goes into it long after the writer has done her job, you just have to let go of it and let things develop the way they develop. It’s a good lesson.

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