If you watched The Late Show with David Letterman this week you would have seen a truly remarkable thing: an out lesbian comic doing a stand-up routine about her girlfriend on prime time network television.

A little after midnight on Tuesday night, March 18th, stand-in host Tom Sizemore (Letterman was out with an injury) introduced comedian Suzanne Westenhoefer, who almost immediately launched into a routine that began with "my girlfriend and I have been together for ten years, and we have absolutely nothing in common."

She then proceeded to riff on a variety of topics, including how her girlfriend is a closeted eighth-grade English teacher who always returns Suzanne's love notes with grammar corrections; how she's surprised her mom lets her and her girlfriend sleep in the same bed together when they visit because "we never let her and my stepfather sleep in the same bed when they visit us...we have very impressionable animals!"; and how the (straight) cruise director on the all-lesbian cruise never "gets it" and continues to say "ladies and gent--oops" over the loudspeaker.

Westenhoefer was laid-back and funny, and the audience responded well to her performance. In this regard it all seems fairly standard, just what you'd expect from a comic good enough to land a spot on one of the top late-night shows...except that there was nothing standard about it.

In fact, this non-event was actually was on a clear indication of the progress we've made in increasing and improving lesbian visibility in recent years. I can't imagine turning on the television even five years ago and seeing a publicly-identified lesbian talking so matter-of-factly about writing love letters to her girlfriend. For the first time, lesbian viewers were able to turn on a late night talk show and see a stand-up routine that explicitly and unabashedly included us.

Besides the mere fact that she was on the show in the first place, the significance of Westenhoefer's performance was that it assumed an audience that was lesbian-friendly. There was no attempt to skirt the topic, or to introduce the subject into the conversation gradually--Westenhoefer made it clear from her opening line that she was gay and then proceeded as if this information was not at all unusual.

In short, she assumed lesbianism was no big deal to the majority of Americans--and the audience seemed to agree, laughing loudly at many of her jokes and clapping enthusiastically when she finished.

Suzanne Westenhoefer has been doing stand-up for a long time now. I first saw her perform in 1995 at my college; she was a big hit with the packed audience of lesbian, bisexual, and straight women then, and she has gone on to do several sold-out tours around the country since then.

But it is only recently that Westenhoefer has started to get broad national attention. This is partly because she has worked long and hard to get it, and partly because of the increase in lesbian visibility in the media in the last five years. From lesbian characters on sitcoms and dramas to lesbian issues highlighted on news magazine shows like Prime Time Live and The Barbara Walters Special to lesbian characters on daytime television, television is now much more hospitable to a lesbian stand-up routine than it was even a few years ago.

Other lesbian comics have paved the way as well, of course. Lea Delaria has done a number of guest-spots on TV (on shows like Ellen and Friends) and in movies (The First Wives Club), and Kate Clinton has had several appearances on talk shows like Good Morning America, the Rosie O'Donnell Show, and Nightline. Marga Gomez has also had modest success in mainstream venues, with small parts in Batman and Sphere.

Ellen Degeneres did her now-famous "conversation with God" stand-up routine on The Tonight Show in 1986 (becoming the first female comedian to be asked to sit with Carson following her first appearance), but her stand-up routines never contained explicitly lesbian content. She wasn't out then, either, and although Degeneres has made numerous guest appearances on talk shows since coming out publicly, the appearances were to promote her television show and did not generally include a stand-up performance (and her stand-up routines still never include much lesbian-specific content).

Although this is her first exposure to a national audience on network TV during prime time, Letterman is not Westenhoefer's first television appearance--that was in a 1991 episode of Sally Jesse Raphael entitled "Breaking the Lesbian Stereotype...Lesbians Who Don't Look Like Lesbians."

Westenhoefer went on to become the first openly gay comic to host her own HBO Comedy Special in 1994, which also included very specific references to lesbians and lesbianism. Most recently, she played a straight woman in the 2002 romantic lesbian comedy A Family Affair, which also stars Helen Lesnick, Michele Green, and Erica Shaffer.

Like Clinton, Delaria, and Gomez, Westenhoefer has refused to subvert her sexuality in public and in fact always discusses it very candidly in her act--although the majority of the audience for her stand-up routines are lesbians, so that is not exactly risky (although it was at one time, when Westenhoefer was first starting out). But the fact that she was able to successfully present the same routine to the largely heterosexual audience on Letterman is ground-breaking--partly because it was framed as just another comedy routine.

Westenhoefer's identification as a lipstick lesbian may account for some of her mainstream commercial success over other out lesbian comedians, since television and film have always preferred conventionally feminine lesbians over more "masculine" ones since the former are perceived as less of a visual threat to traditional notions of what it means to be a woman. But if Westenhoefer wasn't a talented comedian she wouldn't even be in the consideration set, and her increasing popularity is a sign that television is moving in the right direction in terms of improving lesbian visibility.

This won't trigger a tidal-wave of change--it's not like we're suddenly going to see out lesbian comics doing stand-up routines about lesbians every other night on prime time television, and Westenhoefer's not going to become a household name by this time next year. But it is a historic moment, both for Westenhoefer's career and for lesbian visibility on television, and worth reflecting on before it gets lost in the shuffle of just another "first" for lesbians on television.

Read our interview with Suzanne, or check out her official site