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Morning Brew – Wednesday, October 13: “Essence” features its first lesbian couple, Ellen invites Perez HIlton on her show

Hi friends!

How did you like Lip Service and/or Glee last night? Lot’s of lesbian TV!

In the meantime, let’s talk about some other stuff.

Essence magazine, for the first time ever, is featuring a lesbian couple in its Bridal Bliss section of essence.com. Aisha and Danielle Moodie-Mills were married in August, and the black women’s lifestyle magazine is excited to feature them in the popular section of the website. Says Managing Editor Emil Wilbekin:

Essence has a history of covering the LBGT community and the inclusion of Aisha and Danielle’s wedding in our Bridal Bliss feature is a natural extension of that commitment, The Moodie-Mills’ are a wonderful couple with a beautiful love story, and Essence.com aims to support and celebrate Black women in all their diversity.

Aisha, president of Synergy Strategy Group, a Washington, D.C.-based political consulting firm, said she’s happy to be part of the first lesbian couple featured by the mag.

For 40 years, Essence has been the leading voice for black women. We are honored that Essence chose to tell our story of love and commitment as it makes this historic step forward.

It’s about time!

Do any lesbians actually think Kathy Griffin is a lesbian? I never got that vibe, but she told a reporter that people assume she’s gay.

I’m not gay, although people think I’m gay. So I like to call myself gay-adjacent or gay-friendly. But I do enjoy vaginal sex with a penis. I don’t know how much clearer I can be about that.

And that’s why she’s more of a hit with the boys than the girls!

Perez Hilton asked Ellen DeGeneres if he could come on her show to discuss bullying, and she invited him on. Why? Because he is changing his ways. According to ABC News, Perez is vowing to quit bullying and outing people on his site, and wanted Ellen to be the one he spoke with about it. The blogger said:

Over the last two weeks I have been doing everything I can to bring awareness to the teen suicides and gay bullying. In doing so a lot of people have called me a hypocrite and a bully myself and a big one … From now on I really want to be part of the solution and not part of the problem.

The episode will air today.

Lady Gaga is so huge, she is getting not one, but two comic books in her honor. Here’s the cover of her new one, which gives me hope that the Telephone prisonyard kiss will be animated inside.

Need some Halloween ideas? How about a True Blood costume, complete with blood stains?

Ms. Magazine has a great piece, just in time for LGBT history month. “Jill Johnston Taught Me to Be a Lesbian” is all about the late writer/activist who was not only an intelligent feminist, but kind of an extrovert. Ms. writes:

Johnston was an outrageous public figure, bringing laughs as well as jaw-dropping attention to herself. Like the time she jumped into a Hamptons’ swimming pool at a private feminist fundraiser and swam topless while Betty Friedan was speaking. (Friedan says that her own boob somehow escaped from her “otherwise demure scoopneck dress” because the elastic of the neckline broke as she tried to divert attention from Johnston’s water ballet.) Even more famously, while Johnston participated in a well-publicized town hall debate pitting her, author Germaine Greer, New York NOW president Jacquelline Ceballos and literary critic Diana Trilling against anti-feminist figurehead Norman Mailer, she didn’t just give a subversive speech (“All women are lesbians except those who don’t know it yet”) but ended up hugging and kissing on the floor of the stage with two women friends. “Come on Jill,” said an exasperated Mailer (who said he did want to talk about lesbianism, dammit, if only Johnston would stop talking/performing), “Be a lady.”

There’s also a hilarious video of the Mailer speech, which you’ll have to watch to believe. I wish Jill Johnson had taught me how to be a lesbian! If only my parents had conceived me sooner.

Speaking of the 1970s (Johnson’s heyday), there was a conference in NYC over the weekend called “In Amerika They Call Us Dykes: Lesbian Lives in the 1970s” and out writer Emily Douglas was there to cover the discussions. She writes at Bilerico:

Two remarkable plenaries took up the animating questions of the conference with humor and verve; on Saturday, Sarah Schulman, Lisa Duggan, Joan Gibbs and Urvashi Vaid trained a wide-angle lens on the revolutionary goals of lesbian-feminism. Joan Gibbs, now general counsel at the Center for Law and Social Justice, noted that her biggest disappointment was nothing less than “that we failed to realize our fundamental goal: a world of peace and justice free of class, race, and sex.” For those who weren’t alive, alert or political in the 1970s lesbian-feminist scene, it was an opportunity to understand just how heady those days were, and just how expansive the lesbian-feminist imagination was.

What a cool experience, and a reminder that we’re still working toward the same goals that we were 40 years ago.

On TV today: lesbian-themed episodes of Bringing Home Baby (TLC 8 a.m.) and Malcolm in the Middle (FX 4:30 p.m.); But I’m a Cheerleader (Flix 4:15 p.m.); new episodes of America’s Next Top Model (CW 8 p.m.), Hellcats (CW 9 p.m.) and The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC 9 p.m. and midnight). (Thanks Roni!)

TTYL.

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