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Welcome to the New Heather Matarazzo

Actor Heather Matarazzo gets giddy every time she talks about the new television series she’ll be appearing in, Exes & Ohs. She goes as far as calling it “the most spiritually transforming experiences in my life.” Based on a short film by Lee Friedlander and Michelle Paradise, the show will air on Logo next fall.

Now 23, Matarazzo has made it through a lot since her “Dollhouse phase.” When she was just 12, she starred in Welcome to the Dollhouse as the painfully awkward Dawn Wiener, struggling to make it through the brutality of junior high where she sports braces and suffers serial humiliation, including her schoolmates taunting her with chants of “Lesbo! Lesbo!”

That kind of ridicule can’t be easy for any preteen actor to endure, let alone one who was right then starting to question her sexual orientation – even though she did have blissful ignorance on her side.

“I didn’t even know what lesbo meant!” Matarazzo says. But she made a point of finding out, and then it was: “Oh my God! That’s what I am, a lesbian!” After this revelation, she was more excited than distressed: “Then I’d go around set to the people I really liked and say, ‘I’m a lesbian. I’m a lesbian.'”

But once the film wrapped, Matarazzo was expected to go back to being a regular (by then) 13-year-old, and regular 13-year-olds don’t talk about what it means to be gay. She felt isolated, and says she didn’t have the language to talk about her feelings. Referring to gay youth in general she says: “It’s like everybody else has been given this handbook on how to relate to other people and we haven’t.”

Apparently Matarazzo’s confidantes on the Dollhouse set kept quiet about the girl’s epiphany, because it wasn’t until 2004 that she came out publicly. In an interview with the New York Daily News she casually used “she” when talking about the unnamed person she was in love with then.

It wasn’t planned and Matarazzo didn’t think it was a big deal at the time, but since then she’s been warmed by all of the fans who have thanked her for coming out.

And right away she felt relieved not to have to bring a male date to movie premieres anymore, something she had been doing up until just a few years ago. She says she is no longer “apologetic, ashamed, secretive,” and feels more comfortable than she ever has.

Matarazzo continues to nonchalantly mention being gay in dealings with the press, even when no one is asking about it. In the December 2005 issue of Budget Living magazine you can find a full page spread devoted to the spoils she selected on a limited-budget Toys ‘R’ Us spending spree sponsored by the magazine. In a caption describing one of her purchases, the game Life, she suggests that players make their own rules: “Who says you have to marry a boy? You can marry whoever you want.”

In the photo she wears a rainbow bracelet and candidly mentions other details of her personal life, including that the reason she chose a Cabbage Patch Kid is that she feels a special bond with the dolls because she is adopted.

Raised a strict Roman Catholic in Oyster Bay, Long Island, Matarazzo says she was always a tomboy, even though her mother discouraged it. “I had a little pink bike with a banana seat,” she recalls, “but I wanted the boy bike and I wanted to be the one that did the ramps and the jumps.”

In her junior and senior years of high school Matarazzo went to the BOCES Cultural Arts Center for half days and studied musical theater. “I love musicals more than anything else,” she says.

Besides wishing she could do musical theater, Matarazzo dreams of playing Mary from The Well of Loneliness. “It’s a project I’ve been trying to get into the works for a little bit of time now,” she says.

This is someone who has long loved center stage, taking the mike at age 6 at a dress rehearsal for an AIDS benefit and asking her impatient fellow volunteers ? many of them adults ? what are you guys doing? If you’re going to be cranky go home! It’s an important cause and we’re doing this for a reason.”

Matarazzo says she always had visions of gliding onto the stage if she ever won an award, but in reality things didn’t work out that way at the Independent Spirit Awards ceremony in 1997, when she was honored for Best Debut Performance. I hear my name called and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh!’ I had no idea I was going to win. And I go up the stairs and I trip on my skirt. I almost fall flat on my face,” she recalls.

“That’s me in a nutshell,” Matarazzo says. But she feels like she’s starting over now that she’s in her twenties, and looks forward to her thirties and forties. She’s happy she gets to play characters that are interesting, attributing this to a self-impression that “I’m not that pretty girl next door.”

Matarazzo has always struggled not to feel like an outsider, much like many of the characters she has played ? people who are ostracized for various reasons. Besides Dawn ‘Wiener Dog’ Wiener, she has played Helen Keller in a regional stage production and a mentally retarded girl who is gang-raped by a group of football players in the 1999 TV movie Our Guys. The latter, based on a true story, is the work she says she is most proud of.

Matarazzo has had roles in parts 1 and 2 of The Princess Diaries as well as in Sorority Boys, Scream 3, and Devil’s Advocate Another of her films, Home of Phobia, screened at Sundance in 2004 and is rumored to be released later this year. Her television credits include Law & Order, ER, Roseanne and Strangers with Candy.

Believe in Me is Matarazzo’s latest movie. Now in post-production, it’s about a long-shot girls’ basketball team in 1964 Oklahoma.

Matarazzo recently finished shooting the first episode of Exes & Ohs (formerly titled The Rules), which she refers to as “a lesbian Sex and the City.” Her co-stars are Megan Cavanaugh, Angela Featherstone, Michelle Paradise, Cathy DeBuono, and Marnie Alton. She says DeBuono likens working together to being given “spiritual contracts,” and Matarazzo concurs: “It’s like we were all meant to work together, and this is the beginning of something amazing and special and fabulous.”

Spirituality is central in Matarazzo’s life, even though she turned away from religion when she first came to terms with her sexuality. She found solace in born-again Christianity for several years, but says she now has a personal relationship with her own concept of God that suits her best.

“At the end of the day it’s just about compassion, justice, honor and humility ? all those really great things we take for granted,” she now believes. It’s a spirituality with room for being a lesbian, something that also led Matarazzo on a winding path before she came to terms with it.

The beginning of that path was both exciting and scary for her. She remembers the first time she kissed a girl: “We were sitting in my pink room with pink carpeting. It was summer and we were sitting Indian-style across from each other and I was so incredibly nervous. And I thought, ‘Yeah, I am definitely gay.'”

Matarazzo also recalls intense nervousness the first time she kissed her first girlfriend, around age 15 or 16. “I had to excuse myself and I threw up in the bathroom. I had such butterflies,” she says.

She’s come a long way since then, both on-screen and off, and it will be fascinating to see what she has in store for us next.

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