Top 10 Amazing Gay Women in Showbiz
by MoonCake
Professional Organization of Women in Entertainment Reaching UP! Or POWER UP! If you haven’t heard about this already, Power Up! is a non-profit organisation set up in the USA with the motto “to promote the visibility and integration of gay women in entertainment, the arts, and all forms of media”. How great is that!? They’ve been around since 2000 and they’ve been giving us the low down on the cream of the crop of gay women in showbiz.
It’s no surprise that Ellen topped the original list of ‘Most Powerful Gay Women’ in 2001 and Rosie O’Donnell the second list in 2002 so changes were in order to open up the nominations and here we are, with the most amazing gay women in showbiz of 2009. These women won’t be our regular celebrity types that we know from ‘showbiz’. To be quite honest, we probably won’t have heard of most of them (especially here in the UK).
But that’s not the point, is it? The list is about celebrating the achievements of gay women throughout the media industry, not how many fans they have or how much influence they possess. But yet, it is also something more; that there are so many women who are so proud of who they are and what they have accomplished that they would allow their names to be published so openly, to promote visibility of gay women in general. Every year this number will grow and I think it’s done a great deal for lesbians in society.
These women have been instrumental in giving us our own niche of lesbian movies (that don’t cross into the porn genre), hit shows such as South Of Nowhere and even an entire TV channel aimed at the LGBT audience in the form of LOGO. Power Up! themselves, gave us Itty Bitty Titty Committee and D.E.B.S., as well as providing the funding for many short films. What would we do without these women? Perhaps be severely bored on our movie nights in. We’d definitely never have had the L Word!
There’s an underlying problem here, though. Have you guessed it? I’ll give you a clue: it’s in the word ‘Showbiz’. Do we use that word in the UK? It’s all very well that the USA has a brilliant outfit to push for this visibility but where is our side of the story? As far as I can see, we don’t have one. Correct me if I’m wrong, please.
Maybe it’s time for us lesbians in the UK to get more ‘integrated’. Not just in entertainment perhaps. Top Ten Amazing Gay Women in the UK? Hmmm…
The awards will be presented at the 9th Annual Power Premiere Celebrity Gala on November 1st in Hollywood. For the first time, there will also be the Top 10 Amazing Gay Men in Showbiz (they deserve a piece of the action too).
Top 10 Amazing Gay Women in Showbiz Top 10 Amazing Gay Men in Showbiz
Kelly McGillis, actress Paris Barclay, director and producer
Megan Cavanagh, actress Lance Bass, singer, actor, author, producer
Rachel Maddow, TV host Bob Cohen, producer
Susan Miller, writer C. Jay Cox, director, screenwriter
Patricia Resnick, writer Silvio Horta, writer, producer
Carol Leifer, writer Graham Kaye, Talent agent and President of CP Productions
Liz Feldman, writer Mark V. Olsen, TV producer, screenwriter
Harriet Newman Leve, producer Will Scheffer, writer, producer
Sharon Isbin, musician Don Roos, writer, director
Angela Courtin, Snr VP of Marketing for MySpace Gus Van Sant, director
Maybe you should do one for the UK?
Rachel Maddow gets me v excited. It’s the blazer adn all that political discourse – yum.
Rachel Maddow – yes. do you know she lived in a squat in like walthamstow or something for several years*? i think she had a scholarship to oxford but hated it, and decided to live in this feminist squat where she felt more ideologically comfortable. what a hero.
*well – that’s what I read in the guardian.