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When you approach celebrities about being featured or interviewed for Curve, how receptive are most of them to being associated with such an explicitly lesbian magazine?
Honestly, it’s pretty difficult. It always has been, even when I was at Girlfriends. When I was at Girlfriends we had a list of 100 top celebrities that we were chasing at any given time and we would follow up constantly. At Curve we’re often offered interviews with a particular actress that end up falling through and then we’ll see them on the cover of a gay men’s magazine. There isn’t the same taint for actresses to talk to the men’s magazines.

I find that the actresses I’ve interviewed like Laura Innes, Susan Sarandon, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Tilley, Jada Pinkett, etc are women who are really comfortable with themselves and sort of want to shape their image their own way. Of course, that still means that we have to rely on their publicists and managers to let them do the interview which in many cases they just won't.

It’s particularly bad for actresses who are rumored to be gay but haven’t come out yet. I think they get frightened just taking our calls.

Any celebrities you’ve interviewed or profiled in the last few years that you found particularly interesting and/or easy to work with? Any that were particularly difficult to work with?
On the difficult side, I interviewed Chastity Bono for QSF last year and it was like pulling teeth. I think she’s so guarded from being in the tabloid media all of her life that it’s just really difficult for her to open up. I interviewed Martina Navaritilova for Curve right after Sept. 11th and that was a really tough interview because I was trying to talk about the backlash against immigrants and she really thought I was an asshole, I think.

I interviewed Dominique Swain and she was so young that it was like talking with my little sister—I just wanted to stop and give her advice.

On the particularly interesting side, I interviewed a bunch of women for Girlfriends, Curve, and Alice that I just thought were really engaging, really authentic. Susan Sarandon was making breakfast for her kids while we talked and Jada Pinkett was nursing. Tracy Bingham (the Baywatch babe) was sort of drunk when we talked and she took the cell phone into the can when she had to tinkle.

Camryn Manheim had such a great activist spirit that I got up from that interview more inspired than I ever had been. Same too for Valerie Red-Horse (the director of Naturally Native) and ER’s Laura Innes. Jennifer Tilley was really sweet (and yes, that’s her real voice) and Rain Pryor seemed like she was altogether too empathetic to be in Hollywood. Nora Dunn was kind of snotty, true to her image. Harvey Fierstein was really intelligent (he could talk circles around me).

Angelina Jolie was a stunner. She kept saying things like how she was in love with Jenny Shimizu and how her marriage might not work out; with each new revelation I tried to play it cool so she wouldn’t realize how amazingly excited I was.

Probably the interview that had the most impact on me, though, was Dana Plato. I did a series of interviews with her for Girlfriends, Femme Fatales, and Café Eighties and then she died. She seemed like a really fragile bird and she kept saying she wanted to be remembered for how she overcame her addictions. I was very saddened by her death. Hollywood’s a tough world.

What current Hollywood trend/stereotype do you think is the most detrimental to the visibility/image of queer women?
I suck at determining which stereotypes are detrimental because I’m actually a rare queer girl who liked Basic Instinct, think criminal lesbians are sexy, and don’t care if screen dykes wear lip gloss. I think that there’s a fine line between laughing at us and laughing with us and I think too often that the man-hating lesbians usually fall on the wrong side of that line. The flip side, though, is that a lot more representations of lesbians are now in the proud and affirming, we’re-just-like-you mode which is nice but not really all that engaging.

I also think that lesbians can be hyper vigilant about lesbian representations so much so that they have debates about whether a particular character is lesbian enough. These debates often amount to femme bashing (or, occasionally butch bashing) and they’re really limiting, I think, to filmmakers. I am always on the wrong side of that debate, too.

What do you think about the development of an all-lesbian series (Showtime’s The L Word)? Do you think it is likely to be successful (both financially and critically)?
Well, I’m really excited about it because they’ve attracted a great cast and I think that is more evidence that women are more willing to play lesbian roles now days. But I’m concerned that there may be problems since the show was just delayed until the 4th quarter [of 2003]. That can’t be good. Financially, I think it’s a long shot, especially without more marketing. You can’t successfully run a show on lesbian audiences alone. Maybe a one-timer you can, but not a series. Imagine if Will & Grace only attracted gay viewers.

Queer women in mainstream entertainment are usually white; do you see any movement towards a more racially diverse representation of queer women in the near future?
No, not really. Viewers of color tend to get all excited each time there’s a person of color on screen, and for lesbians of color, it’s even more groundshaking. Certainly there are some new notables: Iyari Limon on Buffy, Sonja Sohn on The Wire, and, of course, The L Word has a few women of color (in all fairness, The L Word has a really diverse cast, including the first lesbian Native woman on TV). I think those are all part of the outgrowth of the push for more diverse portrayals on screen and that’s a great development.

Basically I think anytime a queer person of color is added to the TV landscape, albeit in the background, on a commercial, or in the main role, it’s another advancement because television is the mirror by which Americans inspect their variegated complexion. So it’s good to see people of color, persons with disabilities, queers, the “others” represented.

But, among the women who can carry a show, or a film, that’s a pretty small minority of a very small, very white group of A-list actors. TV is a lot better than film at trying out newcomers but it’s still drawing from a pretty small pool of actors that Hollywood thinks are bankable. I think that’ll exclude a really diverse representation of women for some time. But, hey, who knows.

Call me when you actually see an Asian woman during prime time (who isn’t on an ER rerun) and we’ll chat.

Do you think bisexual women are portrayed differently than lesbians in film and television? How?
Sure, they’re usually portrayed as straight women who dabble. It’s not a legitimate sexual orientation but rather an offshoot of their heterosexuality. Often times, bisexual women are still—as in New Best Friend—the oversexed, fucked-up girl. The problem is heightened, too, by the fact that bisexual women aren’t really accepted by lesbians either—on or off screen—so they’re sort of women without a community in terms of lobbying for representation.

Do you think the entertainment industry is more accepting of lesbians in positions of power (e.g. producers, directors, writers, etc.) than it used to be?
Yes, because more women are in power. I don’t think sexuality behind the scenes is of much of a issue in Hollywood anyway and power players like Nina Jacobson, who is president of Buena Vista. There’s also Dana Goldberg (she’s VP development at Village Roadshow, did Two Weeks Notice) and of course Christine Vachon (her star just keeps rising) and a slew of TV writers (well, at least three) which includes Anne Donoghue (who’s also producer of CSI), Liz Friedman (Hack), Kim Newton (Fastlane), and Elizabeth Sarnoff (Crossing Jordan).

I’m not sure what Amanda Bearse is directing but I always felt that she brought a particularly queer perspective to her shows (Veronica’s Closet, Married with Children, Jesse).

I think women in general, like Lynda Obst and Mimi Leder (just to name two) really further the cause of lesbians in the entertainment industry even when they’re straight.

From your perspective, how have indie films contributed to lesbian and bisexual visibility in entertainment in the last several years? Is this changing?
I think indie films are the blood in the veins of lesbian filmmaking. Very few of our films are mainstream releases, even if they eventually get mainstream distribution. And the impact of indie art house fare has brought audiences to a wider array of films than ever before. I think The Hours, for instance, owes a great deal to the indie art house lesbo films that preceded it. The only part of that which I really feel is changing is that a greater number of individuals now have access to indie films, so much so that they aren’t all that indie anymore.

What’s your background (age, hometown, ethnicity, education etc)?
I'm 35, but I’ve been in publishing since I was 13 (eek)

Grew up in Southern California until I was 13. I lived in the non-beach cities of conservative orange county, in the Little Saigon area of Garden Grove, and in Southeast LA county (Norwalk, Downey, Pico Rivera).

I was essentially a failed child actor. I did community theater (Wizard of Oz, that kind of thing) and went on constant auditions for both theater and walk on parts. My friend Rhonda had a family band and they performed 5 nights a week while my friend Anne performed violin with a local orchestra. I moved at 13 to live with my grandmother and aunt in Payette, a small farm town of 5,000 people in rural Idaho. My father’s family is 3rd generation in Payette so I generally consider Payette home. When I got to Payette—seriously, a week later—one of my friends turned up in a walk-on role on Three’s Company and I thought, thank god, I don’t have to do that crap anymore. A couple months later I started writing for our local newspaper (which was so small my family calls it the “spitwad.”).

I live in the Santa Cruz Mountain region of California. My partner is a park ranger so we actually live on a nature preserve. It’s about 30 minutes from San Francisco and we can see the coast from our back porch. It’s a nice mixture of urban and rural. We can buy gourmet goat cheese at 2 in the morning but we still have to burn wood to heat the house.

I’m mixed race Native American (Cherokee/Choctaw). My father is adopted so we don’t know his background.

My education is rather unimpressive, actually. I started college at Tulane University in New Orleans. Fell in love with the city but could never really afford school. I left the first year with something like $20,000 in debt. I delivered the New York Times to professors but that was only part time. After I left Tulane, I never went to school without working a 40 hour workweek again.

Then I spent a semester at Xavier University, which is a black, catholic university in New Orleans where we were actually taught by nuns occasionally; my girlfriend and I were the first non-black students to live in the dorms and I was there, technically, on a partial performing arts scholarship. I’m a terrible singer though so I think it was some kind of affirmative action thing that got me in. During that semester I got hired by Blanchard to edit financial newsletters and write for Republicans (I wasn’t out—or enlightened—yet;-) so I took time off of school. I moved to New York, worked as a temp at magazines like Details (back when it was still co-gendered) and New York Woman, publishing houses like Random House, etc.

I have great stories about my NYC experience because I went filled with all these images of success and my head hunter that recruited me was so complimentary. She’d sit in her chair screaming out things like, “How about Rolling Stone?! You want Rolling Stone?! They’d love you!!!!” Then on my first interview—at Modern Bride, where I very much did not want to work—I apparently wore the wrong outfit. When I came out of the interview I called my recruiter who had already spoken with the magazine and, while I was on this grimy public pay phone, she spent at least 45 minutes berating me: my choice of clothing (my suit was a mustard color), my earrings (gold), my lipstick (red), and my hair (too big, she said). I was crying and begging for one more shot so she told me to go out and buy something more conservative for tomorrow’s interview at Glamour.

So that night my friends and I went to Lord & Taylor’s and maxed out our credit cards to buy me this Ralph Lauren ankle-length, gray flannel riding suit that was all the rage plus pearls, black pumps, gray suede headband, and a giant makeover from Channel. I couldn’t actually even bend over in the suit but it was the most expensive thing I had ever worn so I was sure I would just ooze confidence. When I got to Glamour, the office was FILLED with these tiny wasted, long legged creatures who were in several different tropical colors of the rainbow. I felt like a giant toad in a sea of pink flamingoes. Even my interviewer came out sporting a red and white polka dot mini dress with 6 strands of pearls. Ugh. After the interview, I ran out to the car, tore off the outfit and put on a comfy red sweater for my next interview. Even though I actually got offered the Glamour job, I took the one at McGraw Hill simply because my boss there actually said, “Nice sweater.”

So, where was I? Oh, college. After NY came LA, semester at Chaffey College, then a year at Idaho State University (wife was finishing her masters degree), then some study at UC Berkely, and finally I finished up at New College of California, which is this really queer-positive, hippie school where everyone is encouraged to “process” way too much. I finished in a weekend program the year we started Girlfriends.

Where do you see the visibility of lesbian/bi women in entertainment five years from now?
Well, hopefully, more, more, more, though I do worry that the political direction of the country right now will affect arts in a variety of ways—both through funding (lack of) and fundamentalism (too much). I already feel like the country is on a conservative track and that’s never good for lesbians. I do, hope, though, that the reality TV movement is nary a blip on the radar in five years. I couldn’t stand another half decade of Joe Millionaire.

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