Out actress and comedian Wanda Sykes will appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno tonight on NBC. Of course, she’ll probably be promoting her television show, The New Adventures of Old Christine, but she and Leno might just have a few other things to talk about.
After all, it’s the first time Sykes has been a guest on the show again since she came out as a married lesbian in November during a gay rights rally in Las Vegas. At the rally, she told the crowd that she felt “attacked” by the passage of Proposition 8, and declared, “I’m proud to be a woman. I’m proud to be a black woman, and I’m proud to be gay.”In previous appearances on The Tonight Show, Sykes talked around issues like gay marriage, but did so without naming herself a lesbian (though Sykes has long been out in her live stand-up performances). Now that she’s out, it’s safe to say she’ll be a target for the same boring questions about domestic life that Leno would ask any of his other guests.
Here’s a clip of Sykes’s last appearance on the show back in September of this year, in which she talks about the (then) upcoming presidential election:
How often do you get to hear any woman declare herself a feminist on television? And I love the idea of Wanda Sykes as Secretary of State. If Obama hadn’t already picked the right woman for the job, I would forward him the Leno clip for consideration.Watch Sykes on Leno tonight at 11:35 p.m. EST.
