Earlier this year, when producer Nancylee Myatt was casting the lead roles for the lesbian P. I. series Nikki & Nora she was creating for UPN, she was surprised by "the amazing amount of talent that walked through the door," according to her recent interview with AfterEllen.com. Rather than resisting the idea of kissing another woman, "some women were actually disappointed that they weren't going to be making out at the session. Some had even been sizing up the other women in the waiting room."

When the finalists did have to kiss for the network executives, "everyone was very comfortable doing the scene" (the roles eventually went to Liz Vassey from All My Children and The Tick and Christina Cox from Better Than Chocolate and the sci-fi series F/X).

Iyari Limon, who played lesbian vampire slayer Kennedy on the last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, admitted in a February 2003 interview with AfterEllen.com that she was "a little nervous about [playing a gay character] at first, but...then I found it wasn’t a big deal at all. So now I’m just enjoying it." According to Limon, she was recently a finalist for yet another gay role, this time on The L Word; although she didn't get the part, the fact that she is willing to play a lesbian a second time demonstrates that she clearly doesn't regret her first go-round.

L Word co-creator and executive producer Ilene Chaiken attributes this interest in part to the lack of interesting roles for actresses, telling the Windy City Times that women are "hungrier for really good material because there are so few roles" for them.

Erin Daniels echoes this sentiment in describing why she was drawn to playing Dana on The L Word. "I was taking a break from acting because I was frustrated that all the parts for women were so shallow, and whenever there was a part for a thinking woman, the producers were always more interested in big names and a lot of beauty" she explains in a January 2004 interview with AfterEllen.com. "Then The L Word came along and I thought 'OK, this is something I could do.'”

Writer/director Helen Lesnick (A Family Affair) expresses a similar frustration in her March 2003 interview with AfterEllen.com. "If you look at the casts of most films they are almost completely male-dominated with maybe one role for the girlfriend of the hero," she said. "We received hundred of resumes for [A Family Affair] of well-known actresses simply because there are no interesting parts being written for women, especially for older women."

Actress Michele Greene (LA Law, A Family Affair) echoes this in a March 2003 interview with AfterEllen.com, saying "being a woman [in Hollywood] is always difficult because women’s roles are generally so one-dimensional."

As female heterosexual characters in television and film continue to be confined to more limited roles than their male counterparts, three-dimensional lesbian characters will only become more and more attractive to actresses, now that the stigma has lifted. The upcoming launch of all-gay channels like here!TV, MTV's Logo, and Q Television will create even more opportunities for this, as these channels create a crop of new series and films with lesbian characters.

But film roles for women have always been limited, so the shift in willingness to play lesbian characters has more to do with the recent success of shows like The L Word and movies like Monster and The Hours, which demonstrated that not only is playing a lesbian no longer a career detriment, but it can even be a career-maker. "Now [actors] see they don’t get pigeonholed," Babbit explains, "they see that Charlize Theron and Hilary Swank continue to make films, that you can even win awards."

Myatt credits The L Word in part for the number of actresses interested in auditioning for Nikki & Nora, saying "I think The L Word may have helped us with that [because] those women have been on the cover of every magazine and newspaper across North America."

Showtime wasn't anticipating this success when casting for The L Word began in 2002, according to Chaiken, who was warned by Showtime execs to expect resistance from well-known actresses to playing a lesbian character. But Chaiken asserts that Jennifer Beals signed on immediately when approached by Chaiken, and "it absolutely set the tone."

Certainly, there are actresses who still aren't comfortable playing a gay character, for a variety of reasons, and although it has become easier for actresses to play gay, the same cannot be said of allowing them to be gay: there is still only a very small number of successful, openly gay actresses in film and TV.

But actresses willing to play lesbian characters finally seem to outnumber the ones who won't, and as fictional lesbians proliferate on film and TV, their effect on viewers' perceptions will hopefully make the world a little more open to lesbians in real life, as well.

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