365daysoflesbians:

Happy September, everyone, and also a happy 78^th
birthday to Lily Tomlin!! The comedian, actress, and lesbian icon was born on
this day in 1939.

In 2013, Lily Tomlin gave an interview to Salon Magazine about her experience as a lesbian comedian working in Hollywood during the 1970s (x).

Mary Jean “Lily” Tomlin was born on September 1, 1939 in
Detroit, Michigan. She comes from a Southern Baptist working class family, having
had a nurse aid as a mother and a factory worker as a father who traveled to
the north after being struck hard by the Great Depression in their home state
of Kentucky. Despite her family’s economic troubles, Lily graduated from Cass
Technical High School in 1957 and went on to study at Wayne State University. During
her time at college, Lily auditioned for a school play and it simply clicked –
she had found her passion and soon changed her major from biology to theater.

After college, she began doing stand-up in nightclubs around
Detroit, but eventually moved to New York City to be closer to the pulse of the
entertainment industry. In the 1960s, she began performing in various
off-Broadway productions and it was from there where Lily found her “big break.”
She first appeared on television in 1965 on The
Merv Griffin Show, had a brief stint as a television hostess with The Music Scene, and eventually became a
household name with her work as a cast member on the sketch comedy show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. Throughout
her career, Lily has also produced several comedy albums and starred in movies;
her turn in the 1975 film Nashville even
earned her an Oscar nomination. Today, she is cherished by many as the voice of
Mrs. Frizzle from the 1990s television series The Magic School Bus and as the current three time Emmy-nominated
star of the Netflix series Grace and
Frankie.

Lily photographed embracing and smiling at her future wife, Jane Wagner (x).

Although Lily had no formal coming out moment, she has been
with her wife, Jane Wagner, since 1971 and has always been one of the few known
lesbians in the industry. On the topic of “being out,” Lily said in 2006:

“I certainly never
called a press conference or anything like that. [Back in the 1970s,] people
didn’t write about it. Even if they knew, they would [simply refer to Jane as]
“Lily’s collaborator,” things like that. Some journalists are just
motivated by their own sense of what they want to say or what they feel
comfortable saying or writing about. In ‘77, I was on the cover of Time. The
same week I had a big story in Newsweek. In one of the magazines it says I live
alone, and the other magazine said I live with Jane Wagner. Unless you were so
really adamantly out, and had made some declaration at some press conference,
people back then didn’t write about your relationship. In ‘75 I was making the
Modern Scream album and Jane and I were in the studio. My publicist called me
and said, “Time will give you the cover if you’ll come out.” I was
more offended than anything that they thought we’d make a deal. But that was
‘75—it would have been a hard thing to do at that time.”

She and Jane were officially married on December 31, 2013. This year, the couple celebrated 46 years together as well as Lily’s third
consecutive Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.

-LC