100 WOMEN WE LOVE 2008
Lily Tomlin’s extraordinary career as a funny lady bloomed on the TV show Laugh-In in 1969, the year of the Stonewall rebellion. Fittingly, she has woven feminism and LGBT life into her characters—the not-so-hardworking phone operator Ernestine, Violet Newstead in 9 to 5 and the numerous personas populating The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, the one-woman play written by Tomlin’s partner Jane Wagner, for which Tomlin won a Tony Award. She was also nominated for an Academy Award for her turn as Linnea Reese in Robert Altman’s Nashville, played recurring roles on TV shows from Murphy Brown to The West Wing, and has won six Emmys, a Grammy, and a Lifetime Achievement Tony Award in 1977. Tomlin, who has called Wagner the most influential person in her life and career, narrated 1995’s landmark LGBT documentary The Celluloid Closet. –KL
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Hats off to the 100 Women We Love, class of 2008 (in no particular order, ’cause we love ’em all!).
Linnet Caban-Brown
Brooklyn native Linnet Caban-Brown’s decision to found Lesbians Against Violence and Aggression was based on personal experience; when her former partner’s abuse landed her in the hospital, she found she had no place to turn. “I started seeking out help from the NYPD, counselors, therapists and medical professionals…they all assumed that a man had done this to me, and when I would tell them it was a woman, they would laugh at me.” She then sought out LGBT resources, but found that most of those programs were geared toward gay men. “That’s when I decided that this was my calling, that I had to fill that gap,” she says. To that end, she and her current partner, Tracee Brown, founded The L.A.V.A.A. Group, Inc., a nonprofit organization which brings awareness to violence in the LGBT community and offers resources to both the abused and their abusers. Caban-Brown is also a senior case manager at Safe Horizons, a spoken-word artist, a plus-size model, and a mom to daughter Mariah, age 9. –CL
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