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Jane Lynch talks about being butch and hating bras

Michael Musto says it best in his Village Voice interview with Jane Lynch: she’s everywhere – and it’s a good thing, too. I mean, we can’t keep watching her as Joyce Wischnia on our L Word DVDs forever, no matter how great the scene where she proposes to Phyllis in the nude truly is.)

Lynch first popped up on our radar playing the hilarious butch dog handler Christy Cummings in Best in Show, a role that obviously wasn’t much of a stretch for her.

Now she’s part of the ensemble for Nora and Delia Ephron’s Off-Broadway hit, Love, Loss and What I Wore, Musto asks her if she’s replacing Rosie O’Donnell, to which Lynch says, “I know they’re gonna give me the butch lesbian to play!”

 

It’s because she does it so well, and says she’s “very attracted to feminine women.”

When asked if she’s always been out, Lynch says:

From 20 on, I was an active lesbian, but I didn’t tell my family till I was 31. We’d still rather not talk about it. I’m glad it’s off the table. I don’t bring it up very much. Just the bare necessities: “I’m coming in on this flight, and we’ll go to the mall.”

While she can currently be seen as Sue Sylvester, the merciless, media-happy cheerleading coach on Glee, Lynch reminisces about her roles in other Christopher Guest films in addition to Best in Show. Her favorite role, she tells Musto, was the porn star-turned-folk singer Laurie Bohner in A Mighty Wind.

Lynch: She’s sexually confident and oblivious to what others might think of her. She has no shame and really loves her feminine, sexy body. I found it in me. I had to dig something up. But I couldn’t wait to wash my hair out and take off the curls and tight pants and push-up bra at the end of the day.

Musto: So you’re not soft and feminine by nature?

Lynch: I identified as a boy most of my life. I felt like a boy.

Musto I didn’t.

Lynch: That’s why I felt like we’d get along! [Laughs.] But that movie helped me along. I’m showing “cleave” all the time now.

Musto: Ever strap them down?

Lynch: Never. I wore bras that smash ’em. You’re not fooling anybody, though. They kind of go flat. It looks like you have a cutting board on your chest.

It seems that Lynch’s personality isn’t all that different from most of her characters. While she’s played gay plenty of times (it was sort of hard to buy her as Julie Child’s newly-married sister in Julie & Julia, wasn’t it?), it’s her sense of humor and candidness that is always consistent. Her involvement in any show is basically enough to get me to watch (smart move, Fox). How about you?

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