Get Used to It: Ep. 76, "Being Out in the Entertainment Industry"

oh [Music] hi i'm sheila cuell welcome to get used to it uh this is our show in which we feature uh issues about the gay and lesbian community but it's obviously for all of you we're happy that you're here today i have two wonderful guests to talk about an issue of people in the gay and lesbian community who have been working all their lives in film or television or in the doing the written word may have started out writing for our community or making product for our community but in many cases have been called upon to either expand or change their horizons and we're going to talk today about what's the better way why do we do these things my two guests are jan oxenberg who is a writer producer for once and again abc's award-winning show and michael kearns who is a performance artist a producer director actor well known i think around our country both of them welcome jan i want to start with you you um we first probably heard about you in the community a number of years ago this sort of fabulous radical wild lesbian filmmaker who was making films about and for the lesbian community that everybody saw everybody loved i want to talk to you a little bit about how you started out making films and why you decided to kind of work from your own life forward as it were well i um i guess i always wanted to do something visual i was in college in new york uh and i decided to do with my thesis as a comic book and uh but the the unfortunate thing is that i have no artistic ability whatsoever i can't draw i can never stay in the lines of the coloring book and so i was working with someone on this thesis that i was doing who was the cartoonist but of course i had no money to pay this person and they decided to do something else like go to a grateful dead concert or something and somehow that all led to my coming out to california to go to cal arts and start using a camera to do the visuals now had you done filmmaking at home or just even just amateur stuff i mean i'm kind of i'm always interested to know why people choose a particular especially something where it's not just we're standing up and acting or talking i mean where you have to actually know how to operate some piece of equipment yeah it's weird actually that i did because my fan i come from a family that is completely incompetent in any mechanical or technical area i mean you know it's like if we ran out of toilet paper they were called a plumber i mean it was really bad um but in high school i got a uh i got a super 8 camera and i went around and obnoxiously filmed all my friends and i seemed to still be doing that actually now did you um identify as a lesbian when you were that young in high school or not until you got out to california or when did this depends on what you mean by identifying yes that's true well let's say to yourself first of all yeeks well i knew on one level that i was a lesbian in high school i i sort of couldn't avoid it since i had these very wonderful erotic dreams every night pretty much about my fellow cheerleaders but unfortunately none of this was uh actually um manifested in in action uh until a few years later so you know i knew but i was not out in any way and i was pretty scared about it so the first film that you ever made what was the subject matter coming out huh i i went to uh cal arts and i got involved with judy chicago she had this uh thing called the feminist art program and the ethos you know at that time and this is in the 70s was women doing artwork drawn from our own lives and everything had to be a circle you know it was that whole um but it it you know i'm being a little facetious but it really did influence me and free me to do something that came from deep inside and i made a short film called home movie it was an autobiographical film about coming out and the reason it's called home movie is that i used a couple of old home movies in it one of which was of me being a high school cheerleader and the other one was my mother sort of training me to follow in her footsteps i was imitating all her motherly duties and that's the first film i made it's been shown all over the world now i guess well it's interesting because not everybody's first film is shown all over the world i mean true i was a good cheerleader obviously um did your mother had you come out to your mother before you made this film oh yeah i forgot to do that actually well that's not entirely true i had sort of come out to her by accident on the way to the airport she said something about you know who i was dating and i said something vague about well you know i hinted that there were women involved in the dating scene and i remember her first very first words out of her mouth where you know there are other methods of birth control jan but we never you know that it just got dropped and in fact i sort of used the film to come out to my parents not to mention the other cheerleaders so how was the film seen i mean how did it get around for people to see well let's see i guess oh and i got an a in the class um there were some beginnings of a you know women's slash lesbian culture uh film showings and people singing and reading poetry and and the film started sort of i went around with it to a lot of different places all over the country and of course i didn't know any film reviewers i mean i was very young i was like 20 21 something so actually i actually asked my mother to write a review of the film for our publicity material she wrote home movie is sensitive and well-made i think my daughter jan is a very talented filmmaker and i hope she goes on to some other subjects [Laughter] but that was very generous of her wasn't it absolutely and did you go on to other subjects i don't think so at least not right away for a while what what uh what came next i was still in film school i made another a film called a comedy in six unnatural acts and that was a half hour film it was a takeoff on stereotyped images of lesbians and each scene was also a spoof of a different genre of hollywood film that a lot of these stereotypes have come from and i guess by that time home movie had you know sort of come to the attention of whatever independent film community was out there and festivals and so on and so both of those films uh you know i went to many film festivals in this country in europe and all over and a lot of people saw them yes a lot of people saw them i don't think i know anyone in the community that didn't see it and it really really struck a chord i think with certainly with lesbians i mean i really have no idea if it was seen outside of you know well i want to say something about that because you know at that time there was a lot of debate in the community about you know should we be trying to educate the straight world should you know what i my opinion about that and this is what i really tried to do in my films was to make films for us that were authentic expressions of our community and make them available to the rest of the world sort of like what you said in your introduction to this show so i was not trying to put on a good face or convince someone that you know we were okay and great and all that i was trying to feed this hunger of our own community for authentic images and let everybody else see it well i think that's it it's interesting you know once you of course do a work of art it no longer really belongs to you the interpretation everything is really much more in the eye of the beholder and that's where i think it gets a great deal of its power you can't control it you don't want to control it and the authenticity of it absolutely reached out to everyone i knew and lots of folks i didn't know who felt as though by saying that the straight world had these wrong ideas about us and that we were almost captured by those straight images to see something saying you don't have to be it was a very strong message i think you know to lesbians and that's part of the power really of film and you know the other uh media but i was also trying i wasn't trying to say oh here's a stereotype you know of this like butch dyke you know oh we're not like that we're really just normal people i was trying to celebrate the strength in some of those stereotyped images while ridiculing the absurdity of some of them you know like there's one of these scenes was called child molester you know it had this woman in a girl scout uniform trying to you know lure little girls with girl scout cookies so it wasn't like we're nice we're you know we're going to be just like you it was get used to it well it's uh one of the reasons i wanted obviously to have both of you on the show at the same time is because that's much of the impression that i got from your work as well michael um tell us a little bit about sort of the early michael kearns work and what what you had in mind and why you decided that performance was this was a strong way to make a statement in the world well i was out in the beginning of the 70s actually as a gay man and i just found more comfort in terms of being an actor if i wasn't in this camouflage mode if i wasn't denying who i was i felt that the purity of my work gained momentum by my being openly gay to myself to the people around me so that you know dictated to a certain extent how i was going to uh negotiate this career and i played a lot of gay roles and i did a lot of gay theater and became identified with that uh people are still waiting for me to tell a different story well that's actually funny though because people would constantly say to me oh is it another gay play as if there was only one type of gay man which i thought was so interesting would they say oh is it another straight play to neil simon and then when i started exactly well you've got a point there then when i started doing a lot of hiv aids theater or works about that the question then started coming oh was it another aids play so i i find it interesting um i'm sort of reverberating from a lot of what jan said i mean i think that one of the expressions she avoided which we all want to avoid is politically correct i mean she wasn't setting out to do politically correct work and nor have i ever set out to do politically correct work because for one thing there's no drama in it there's no stakes it's not about politically correct work is bland and boring and there's nothing to it but i think that the irony here is that by being your most authentic by being your most honest you become your most universal and i think that that's a very difficult lesson to teach them and that's what i try to teach any beginning writer or actor is that you know the thing that you are the most afraid of telling is your greatest gift the thing that you think is the most shocking secretive darkest shadow part of yourself is your money making for the rest of your life it's what will make you a star it's what will put you on the map and that's what i'm just trying to convince people of i mean those are the things that i learned and and my road has been a difficult one just because of the time frame i came out earlier than a lot of people and and i think that it it it had a great effect on the course of my career i'm not complaining and you know after speaking to you the other day i actually kind of thought about it and i thought you know it wasn't necessarily my being noble that kept me on this road it was partly just my being practical in other words i had to make a living the tv and movie industry wasn't hiring me so i sort of had to create my own niche i had to create my own work but in the long run am i grateful yes would i have had it any other way no it's all been fine if i you know if i had been born 10 years later 15 years later i may have gone back and forth in both of those worlds more than i have but it's all fine well but it's it's also interesting to me because we use the word hunger you know that the the community and there really wasn't a community early on it was a lot of people in the closet who were maybe testing the waters of coming out or you know really sort of crossing over from what they had been to being radically different and running off to you know hollywood san francisco wherever and people i think young people still are to escape what they were and become what they think they truly are and there was nothing for us to to look at i mean there was nothing in a way except for there's always been kind of ghetto theater and i'm not saying that's what you were doing but it is an important piece of people's experience with the arts and i think michael you have continued but you started out doing stuff about gay men and after i think after not just diagnosed with hiv but aids you i won't say expanded but you began to include other people in your one-person show which was pretty fascinating considering a little bit well considering that through the sort of 70s you know i was constantly even on television cast as a gay man because i was openly gay and you know the imagination of people in television was oh well he's a gay man well we'll cast him as gay man and not cast me as much else then when aids came along the fascinating thing was here i played all these sort of gay men and within a certain small range but with aids then i made the decision having read script after script after script about the white gay male story i thought somebody has to address the other issues here there are other people who have hiv there are other people dying there are other communities that need to be depicted that need to express themselves so i started researching and wound up doing you know 12 different characters many of whom were blazingly heterosexual some of whom were black some of whom were female so i wound up doing this extreme character work as an actor which i had never done but i go back to my saying by being my most authentic for all those years and not being encumbered by the closet and encumbered by fear that paved the way for me to suddenly blossom with this work that was totally universal and i was able to just because i had the freedom to play a woman to play a straight man to play a black person because my instrument just my physical and vocal instrument was so it had reached a level of purity by doing that work not you know censoring denying being afraid of talking in a deep voice or making my legs go in a certain direction i was a free actor and then i was able to catapult that freedom into playing all these roles so it's really interesting and has there been any bewilderment by people in the community as you moved from you know from the what they saw as your authentic you to including these other kids i think just shocked that i could do it i mean i think there was just you know i i was sort of thought of as this you know kind of guy who could act these gay parts and oh he's amusing and funny and but when i did intimacies i think people went you know there's more to him and there was more to me that i was somehow strangling myself i was unable to express it but until we say i have a right to express this i have a right to be in the mainstream i have a right as an openly gay man to play heterosexual roles even leading man roles unless somebody takes that stance and makes that move forward it ain't gonna happen and we will continue to be victimized by our own victimization and by our own image of ourselves well and to some extent i mean i think this also happened to you although i don't i i didn't really know you and though i've never played a leading man and your life's not over yet is it i mean on camera i understand but tell us what happened after um six unnatural acts the seventh well let's see i moved to new york and i sort of got into doing a film that i never would have planned to do if i had any idea what it was going to turn into um i shot some documentary footage of my grandmother and my family around the time that my grandmother was ill it started out i just did an audio tape you know just to have something of her and one thing led to another uh you know i was in new york sort of being a struggling independent filmmaker which meant that i knew a lot of other struggling filmmakers who would work for me for free basically as i did for them and i ended up shooting documentary footage before my grandmother died and after the family and her friends uh you know sort of going through the whole craziness of saying goodbye and mourning and and family dynamics and i had no idea what i was going to do with this footage i had been able to get grants based on the short lesbian films that i had done and you know to make a long story short i ended up after after a while i wrote a script that incorporated the documentary footage into a narrative and i created a character as a cardboard cutout of a scowling five-year-old who sort of represented my point of view and she in this script goes on a journey to find out what happened to grandma and to figure out how to say goodbye and to try to answer all the great unanswerable questions that these events have raised you know everything from why did grandma have to die to why didn't she teach my mother how to cook and that turned into this feature film thank you and good night that ended up being primarily financed by american playhouse the great public television series that nurtured so much incredible you know independent film work uh and theater and um so i sort of began this odyssey it took many years to finish that film and that you know i guess you could say it took me in a different direction in the sense that the subject matter was not being a lesbian but the form of it was actually very related to the first film that i did you know it had this sort of personal narrative it was nominated wasn't it uh no i thought it was it should have been well it should have been it definitely should have been wow but it was a big hit at sundance well it i i i have seen the film i mean it's it's incredibly moving and um i don't know that anyone at the time would have said jan why are you doing this instead of more lesbian films i mean i don't know did people say this to you in the time that you were sort of taking and working on this um i don't think i felt that kind of pressure you know i always felt within myself that i was not uh you know i was not negating the fact that i was an out lesbian doing films that i absolutely felt that i would in the future do other works that would have lesbian themes as i have done and as i am doing now um so you know i didn't really feel conflicted about it the only thing i really felt conflicted about was whether to make a point in the film that i was a lesbian because as i said it had this documentary footage of the family and you know that was a kind of tricky thing because on the one hand it didn't really there was there wasn't a way in which it organically was part of the footage that i had shot or the way that the film was i would have had to have made a very conscious decision that you know i want to put the word lesbian on any anywhere i have a chance i have like a little rubber stamp you know on like the cereal boxes at gelson's or something that's my mission in life uh you know but on the other hand i had been you know i in a way that is a good thing to do you know we are everywhere i mean you know here is a chance i i have this chance to make this work and you know maybe i should shoehorn it in even if it's with a shoehorn and um yeah i didn't uh i guess the closest it comes is there's a little dialogue between my grandmother and i where um she's oh i say uh you know what would you what do you want me to do what do you wish for me you know she says well i want you to get married and i say well do you have a second choice she says yes i'd like to see you go on a quiz show or get married these days that's a possibility so how do you get from independent filmmaking to writing for chicago hope for you know where you are now writing and producing i mean it seems it seems i think to most people like a really different thing and i guess people would say what did you have to give up you know to do this too did i sleep with well i suppose that would be a good question now in the industry wouldn't it i want to know me too if only um yeah i well what happened is that thank you on goodnight took a long time to get finished so much longer than i ever thought it would because uh it was just such a strange film it had every buzzword that would make someone not want to finance a film it had you know death grandmother cancer i mean it was cardboard cutouts and people really liked the script but it was always like wow you know i really want to see this when it's finished anyway so by the time it was finished i was so broke and i had been like a heroin addict you know any for all those years any money i could get my hands on went into this film and it premiered at the sundance film festival and you know i felt that i really wanted to go in both directions i wanted to [Music] if the film you know had some sort of success i wanted to use that to do more mainstream work while also continuing to do independent films so out of sundance i got an agent you know the film got a theatrical distributor right and i went to hollywood and and um well actually i was hoping my plan almost worked because at this very same time when i got the agent i came out to la i had an idea for a romantic comedy i pitched it around town you know i had never done anything vaguely like that before and amazingly i actually sold it like almost immediately to gina davis her company you know and she wanted me to direct it she had loved thank you and good night so i thought oh that was easy what year was this this would be like 92 maybe something like that um you know i was very naive about how things happen but at the same time so okay so i was writing this romantic comedy for gina davis but i also uh sold an idea for a film to american playhouse to do another film with them that was a fiction film but was uh had a lesbian story and this to me was like the perfect you know well neither of them got made whoops but um but you know i i did continue doing selling you know pitches to studios and writing movies and i guess what happened is that with the um the lesbian film that i was going to make for american playhouse i took it to the sundance writers lab which is part of sundance where they sort of nurture independent directors and producers and writers and while i was there i met uh a man named jason cadams who was working with ed's work and marshall herskovitz when they and winnie holtzman when they did the show my so-called life right which is a wonderful show and after a couple of years when i was doing quite well as many writers in hollywood you know can be very successful and have nothing that they've written ever made which is sort of this existential horror show uh you know that was sort of happening with me i was writing all these scripts and they for one reason or another you know they weren't very typical but we were going ready to go into production on the american playhouse the lesbian film and then american playhouse ceased to exist um so uh jason working with ed and marshall started a show called relativity which was on abc and asked me if i wanted to write for it and i was so frustrated you know sitting in my little room writing things that weren't getting made that i thought well you know let me try this this should be interesting and it was a great uh treat that jason had made one of the major characters a lesbian in that show so i was working for mainstream television but getting to write actually the first romantic lesbian kiss on network television a little bit before ellen did a wonderful show well it's um michael we were talking the other day about both of us actually all of us were talking about some of our colleagues who are in the industry who are acting or you know writing or directing which is even easier to do i suppose if you're if you're gay many of whom are now feeling perfectly safe about coming out but most of whom have not really acted or written or directed in sort of a gay genre theater or television or films do you think it makes a difference in terms of sort of i both how they are with themselves as artists uh and i guess my other question has to do with what the community in terms of how it sees people um would they you know because most of them are just working in a straight world and might play a gay character or might write a gay character without having spent any of their time in sort of our gay culture uh working do you think it makes a difference can i i want to say one other thing just to back up i think that people are safe unless they're a leading man you're right leading a white leading man in film or television cannot be gay yet or at least that's the perception well we know some of these women who haven't necessarily come out that's right absolutely i think ultimately this is becomes a choice it becomes a choice whether you want to to have a politicized a charged career in that way if you want to dance in both worlds or if you don't want to do that i think it's as different as personality and i think just because somebody is lesbian or gay or black or whatever doesn't necessarily mean they're gonna gravitate to a political voice i happen to fit that and it fit me and that's the way i've lived my life um i do however what i do think is important and i think that jan addressed this again beautifully is that you need to somehow reconcile these issues with yourself if you are going to create good art and good work and no matter how you do that whether you maybe do one or two of these shows a year or you have some input i think that the denial aspect and and self-denial is not does not equal good art and i think that that's what uh of course the the movie about her grandmother reflected whether subtly or not it reflected who she is and and being a lesbian might have been a very teensy part of that painting but it's still there because she had had accepted herself and and and and embraced that and i think that that's what's so important about this whole thing well one of the things i think we have it occurs to me in the political world when i was first elected i was the first open gay or lesbian person to be elected in the california legislature people wondered oh is she going to do just you know gay legislation and like you get 50 bills a year like you could think of two maybe you know and and fight those through if if possible and the rest has to be of necessity there's just other things that you need to make laws about not because i wanted to deny that we needed something in the community but there was more that i could do and more that i thought i should do but it also sometimes felt like i need to show them that i'm not just the lesbian you know legislator and of course it turned out to be a nice balance because i got to do everything but it really did occur to me that there would have been less work for our community in the legislature had i not been there that the authenticity of speaking to my legislation or um thinking of what needed to be done even was importance not just role modeling that's not what i'm talking about but the knowing piece and doing for the community and i don't think in art necessarily it just divides nicely but you know there are some things that are made for our community they're shown at film festivals you know the gay film festival and that's the only place you ever see them and it's important the community needs it and i guess i'm trying to hear from you because i don't know that many people choose to do art only for our community in our community it almost feels like even you michael say i don't know maybe early on if somebody gave me a choice not sure i would have done that so i guess part of the question is isn't it important to have this culture which is ours which in which people work and how do we maintain that if it's not really valued or valued enough well that's the age-old question that every you know so-called minority group faces i mean you know jews blacks whatever you know do you want to maintain a separate culture or how to mix maintaining your own culture with uh you know being part of the outside world and um and everyone's fears of being homogenized into you know the disney culture that i agree i mean i think that to have us well then you get into you know are we a culture or were we simply a ghetto you know where we simply i mean you know i certainly i probably have more jewish cultural uh attributes from growing up in my family then i have lesbian or gay attributes from growing up as a closeted gay person exactly um and yet i think that to make art that is so specific that it's comes at universality from that angle as you were saying uh it would be a great loss for people to stop doing that and i think they won't stop doing that i mean it's interesting i was reading in the paper today about um you know sort of the growth of interest in in poetry slams and how interesting that is and how really individual and authentic i think the voices are at least it seemed to me from the articles and from what i've heard how authentic the voices are now who knows if these people will be poets much less you know writers who will then be sort of widely heard and have to think about do i write other things i mean you're writing gay and lesbian characters would they be in the shows that you for which you write if you weren't there well i sort of made it you know a little mission or something to get a gay character on all the shows i worked on it i mean you know jason was a close friend of mine and he put this lesbian character in the show and you know maybe even influenced by his friendship with me so you know it was that that was easy but uh i i've been very lucky that uh i did the show nothing sacred which was about a radical catholic priest not an obvious place you'd find a lesbian and actually what i was able to do there was um i did an episode uh about abortion in which the church secretary has an abortion and i didn't realize this until i did the show but this was the first time since the 70s that a regular character in a prime time series had had an abortion wow that amazing mod in the 70s wow right and i think party 5 had had a storyline about the nev campbell character having an abortion and she decided to have an abortion and then i think her studio notes on the way to the abortion clinic she had a miscarriage but on our show the girl had an abortion and the priest had dealt with it and um it was funny because that that show was created by a jesuit priest bill cain and he worked closely with me on the episode he had a lot at stake because he was an active priest you know this was very dicey for him to be doing this and we would have these you know heated debates about what could be in the script and what couldn't be in the script and at one point he turned to me and he said oh you're just saying that because you're a radical lesbian feminist jew and i'm a male catholic priest [Laughter] well the issue of identity i was at a hate crimes conference or anti-hate crimes conference last night just people in the community in the san fernando valley probably 150 of them gotten together have been five of these town halls now where they they they don't know exactly what to do about it and one woman of course predictably stood up and said you know why do we have to be identified by this or that you know by race or religion or whatever and of course the answer is we don't identify ourselves necessarily that way it's when other people say you are a dirty fill in the blank that we're the ones that are separated out but i wonder um there's a certain stigma attached certainly for actors i think michael you tell me because we have a number of friends and colleagues um who may be out in their personal lives but would i think be a little worried if they were only playing gay characters do you find that to be the case absolutely and i think that that stigma has to we have to end that stigma somehow and i don't know how that's going to happen i mean i suppose it'll happen when the first leading man actor in television or film says he's gay and continues to be able to work and not lose work playing heterosexual roles do you think that'll happen i hope so i mean i feel like all this screaming and yelling i've done will be in vain unless it doesn't happen i mean it isn't going to be me but there's somebody out there who i believe can i mean i think it's ridiculous acting is about acting it's not about who you are when you go home and what you do in bed behind closed doors and that argument is ridiculous that we're not going to believe them if we know that that means that we we believe that arnold schwarzenegger's not knocked off a few people at the 7-eleven before he goes to the studio i mean it's ridiculous let's hope he has i did but you know it's still the same thing with race you know i mean you have an african-american man doing romeo and juliet and people are still talking about how unusual that is and have to comment you know on it um it's back to what we were saying earlier i think that we're in such a state of evolution here and that we we almost can't keep up with these concepts also we're in a state literally california where there's such a high premium placed on stardom and fame and money of course there needs to be a respect for people who want to act gay and lesbian theater in their basement or on their street corner and they shouldn't be belittled or minimized their voices need to be heard and need to be expressed as much as anybody else's but i think that you know i often say to students who are going to try to be actors i say at some point you have to decide do you want to be a star that's fine or do you want to be a great actor or do you want to be both because if you want to be both you're going to have to do a real dance but that's fair but you have to sort of decide these things or do you want to be a political creature who was also an actor like i've been you know but again it goes back to choice how much money do you want to make are you comfortable not living in beverly hills are you comfortable not making a living and and working somewhere else to make money to do gay theater the rest of your life i honor you and applaud you and think you're a fabulous person for making that decision but too often i think these people are derided sort of looked at askance not respected and you know unless you're you know with the thing that people say if you say you're an actor they say what have i seen you in well you can't say in my school play where i was a proud gay person you have to say an academy you have to say i was in traffic and it had to be the movie that was the hit last week or you're nothing that's where society is so wacko in terms of fame and where we don't value art we value fame so does it seem different now though i mean in the 70s in the 60s and 70s there seemed to be at least this kind of thumb your nose at the success notion anyway being independent you know not doing that that was a good thing it's not the case now in the arts and or at least i'm not sure if it is are there i mean independent filmmakers are much more revered i think now because you can actually get distributed and a lot of the films that people are going to see are independent films but they're still mainstream themed films absolutely well i think that somehow it became cool to be rich how does that happen when it's cool to be rich there is no such thing as cool anymore it's all uh a corporate commodity there is no bohemian culture i mean maybe rap is the you know the closest to it which really was a very grassroots i mean i remember going to coney island when i lived in brooklyn uh in the early 80s and you know seeing some rap performance you know on the boardwalk before it became anything in the mainstream uh it wasn't anything that people were doing to have a big record deal you know with def jam or something like that um it is probably i mean whatever you think of the content of it that's another discussion but um it was an art form that was completely specific to a community that was made available to the general public and became part of the mainstream uh you know on a certain level that's kind of a model for what can happen i mean it's you know it's all very complicated about what the values are that made it popular right um but i think that uh it's there are two sides to the coin that the fact that the main we succeeded we won you know the mainstream culture there's will and grace is in the top ten i mean it's incredible you know i'm i'm doing a uh project with melissa etheridge for hbo a movie that's a lesbian love story it's a musical i don't have to go off and be an quote unquote independent filmmaker to make the lesbian film that's going to you know i hope end up being exactly the way we want it to be you know two out lesbians working on it um so in that sense rather than bemoaning this fact i think we should be celebrating it as a victory no i don't think bemoaning is what you're right i mean bemoaning i don't think bemoaning is what we were talking of doing although it's interesting when you talk about melissa or you know katie lange or any of the uh of our sort of musical stars who have been embraced much more broadly really for their talent um the possib it's still stars who will be i mean this project might happen because melissa will do it do you know what i mean and therefore there'd be some interest in it because the mainstream has embraced her and therefore that in its own way becomes a touch so that's the way all films get made i mean if these walls could talk too you know that uh the lesbian-themed show uh you know that really got done because sharon stone decided that she wanted to be in it and you know she was going to be in bed with ellen degeneres and so and yet the vanessa redgrave section was the most poignant the most talked about afterward and continuously uh probably the most admired if i might say so because it was in its own way the most authentic it wasn't embarrassed about itself right you know which is also a kind of an interesting thing i mean i don't know if you've ever seen michael's work but it's talk about not being embarrassed about itself i mean it is so it's literally stunning i mean i can't i haven't seen you can't wait you can't talk to him afterward because you're so stunned i mean it's so moving and are you doing another show michael i mean i know you're a dad with a little girl now and that takes a lot of your that takes a lot of my energy so i'm more writing and teaching and which feels good i can make my impact there too so do you would you have advice then i mean i guess it's sort of funny in a way but there are probably quite a number of young people who are out uh who are in high school or uh graduated from high school either in college or you know out working in the world who think that they would like to do something and they're facing this same thing is there a place first of all for them to do anything in the community and for the community that you know about i mean how do you get to be in a theater i think that almost every major city now has some sort of gay and lesbian theater and i think that it probably will continue to i think that in terms of advice i just go back to that be true to yourself and also don't compare that's the biggest thing that i constantly tell people don't compare your career to someone else's career it's your career and it's your journey don't read variety or the household quarterly if you can help it but you you can drive yourself crazy and you know there's great acting gay straight or otherwise in church basements you know all over the country probably there's wonderful art in poetry readings that five people attend there's brilliant poetry maybe it's brilliant it doesn't necessarily have to be mass marketed or corporately endorsed to be good art and i think that that's the message i'd like people to go away with and on the other hand also there's nothing wrong with being a star and making a lot of money and being a big success and being gay and lesbian nothing wrong with that either but we're sort of in both worlds now and and this is not only true of gays and lesbians this is true of the entire planet in terms of what we're how we're going to negotiate these changes that are here and the perception of art and money and and success and all those things i mean i think we're all in this together but it may be a little bit more pronounced when you're a minority or when you've been undervalued or swept away or not listened to well i feel in terms of advice i would contact the one of the gay film festivals around the country many of them have a lot of resources for gay and lesbian film you know sort of fledgling grant programs and um you can it's a it's a way to network and meet people and be encouraged i mean look at how many films are in this gay and lesbian film festival that's true i mean it's not exactly like people have said oh i'm gonna you know i'm gonna be a a successful star whatever in hollywood and nobody's doing this work um people obviously have a desire to work from what's important to them that doesn't seem to go away it seems to be magnified by having more acceptance and maybe more resources to make it happen and i think the other piece of that is that we want to make certain that we support it too you know that um people i think people are less afraid these days to go to a lesbian film for you know everybody's gonna be taking their pictures and putting it on the fbi internet or whatever um that it's really important to get that variety in your own life you know to attend these performances to you know to go to these films that it's it's a wonderful experience as an audience as well so um well here's the interesting thing we've completely gone through a whole hour together already wow i know it's fast isn't it i hope it was as fast for the audience as it was uh as it was for us so i want to thank you very very much as always thank you for doing this i think it's uh it's it's fun to catch up with people who are uh doing what you're doing and have uh contributed as much uh to our lives as the two of you have thank you very much for being with us as well i think you should take this advice you know make that film write that poem uh go sing somewhere be a success or not as you like but as far as gay and lesbian content out there in the media i think america is just going to have to get used to it [Music] [Applause] [Music] you