By SP

From Kate Clinton’s Official Website came this recent announcement, “This year Kate Clinton celebrates her 25th Anniversary of performing with a 50 city IT'S COME TO THIS! tour across the United States and Canada. She will be celebrating all those laughs, those first dates and those comings out with a special show that also honors 25 years of community building … ‘Kate Clinton has held the mirror that reflects every single issue that has faced us for the last 25 years. We’ve laughed with her, we’ve cried with her, and we’ve been changed by her,’ said Kate Kendell, Executive Director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights.”

Hopefully, this article will help to increase our respect and admiration for the person who has done some much for the gay and straight communities through her work and her service.

Kate Clinton and The L Word
Clinton herself is anything but invisible. She's a tireless champion of gay rights. - New York Blade

Before appearing on The L Word as a sex therapist who was trying to help Bette and Tina to get their sexual spark back, Kate Clinton was already watching the show and enjoying it. She was talking about the show in the AfterEllen Interview with Kate Clinton by Malinda Lo (July 2004).

“…one of my favorite memories is…I think The L Word started the same night as the Superbowl … What a riot! I am in New York and I’m with people who are for the New England Patriots … but we’re just watching this football game and there’s this little voice from somebody who’s holding the clicker and says, ‘The L Word is on in five minutes.’ And then…The L Word came on and it was like the last second of the football game…it was like heavy testosterone…and then it was like totally lesbian, it was great … We still watch The L Word as if it were a sporting event. You know everybody’s always screaming like ‘Oh she did not.’ Everybody…we all hated Jenny.”

Further in the same interview Clinton said that her favorite characters are Shane and Alice, “Well, Shane was actually based on my life … I actually love the woman who plays the bisexual that keeps the fuck chart … Oh my god she cracks me up…I think she’s great. It’s fun to have your own sitcom, soap opera, serial thing to watch. It’s just a blast.”

What The L?
What the L? extends that community into the three-dimensional form of paper and ink. This summer, it’s the perfect accompaniment to the extended right-wing takeover of America. Pack it up in your beach bag and read the essays at random: they’ll remind you that there’s hope for the future. - Afterellen.com

In Kate Clinton’s latest book, What the L?, she talks, not surprisingly, about The L Word as well. “The L-Word’s original name had been Earthlings and the L’s meet regularly at a local queer hangout called The Planet … well, they couldn’t call it Neverland could they? They could have, because most of us older L’s NEVER thought we’d see The L-Word on television. Our household signed up for Showtime, no doubt sinking me and my cultural war bride in a Homeland Security counterinsurgency data mine somewhere … For a few days after the first episode I viewed my own life through an L-Word lens. Me at the dry cleaners – “This would be a great scene,” and fantasized that the character of the young Shane, the sexual roué, was based on my life. Finally, my domestic partner kindly pointed out that I am an actual lesbian. Still there are a few episodes I would like to see.” (Clinton, Kate. What the L? Carroll & Graf Publishers: New York, 2005, pp. 140-141)

Further in the same chapter the comedian describes those few scenes that she would like to see. Read the book, it’s hilarious. It described on Kate Clinton’s Official Website as “a laugh-out-loud collection of dangerous humor from one of the all-time-favorite lesbian comics living under one of the all-time-worst presidents.”

It said in the same biography that What the L? “has been nominated in the humor category for the prestigious 2005 Lambda Literary Award, considered to be the highest accolade for a book from the LGBT community.”

Kate Clinton, the fumerist
“Quick-witted, clear-spoken... She has developed a bizarrely logical, seemingly free-associating style of delivery [and] had this critic in tears from laughing so hard.”
- New York Times

Clinton’s biography on wikipedia.com informs us that “Kate Clinton is a self-described ‘fumerist,’ or feminist humorist, who has set out to prove that being lesbian can be, and often is, funny. She was raised in a large, loving Catholic family. In young adulthood she was a ‘pre-Michael J. Fox conservative’ who attended Le Moyne College, a small Jesuit liberal arts college, and went on to teach high school English and coach.”

On her Official Website, Kate Clinton referred to as “a faith-based, tax-paying, America-loving political humorist and family entertainer. She has worked through economic booms and busts, Disneyfication and Walmartization, gay movements and gay markets, lesbian chic and queer eyes, and ten presidential inaugurals. She still believes that humor gets us through peacetime, wartime and scoundrel time.”

Clinton always considered humor as a way to draw attention to the problems in our society without lecturing or preaching about them. As she mentioned in A Conversation with: KATE CLINTON, “Certainly many people think it’s trying to divert and ignore or stay away from a problem by being funny. But I really think that being funny can move you through tough issues or lighten them momentarily so that you can move on. I’m always admiring the people in meetings who could say something light and break up a hideous gridlock and move along.”

Even though Clinton’s career as a comedian began in 1981, she remembers earlier times when she was making people laugh. On her Official Website’s FAQ page Clinton shared a story when she protested participation at a pre-K dance recital. “I thought I looked like a chubby mesh pot scrubber, so I tucked my tutu into my tights. It killed. In first grade, in what I believe was early gay lip-syncing, I mimed ‘I’m Gettin Nuttin’ for Christmas’ at a school assembly and I caused the gorgeous, curly haired, voluptuous fourth grade teacher, Miss Como, to fall off her chair laughing.  I saw her go down. I was hooked.”

We all have a different sense of humor and sometimes what sounds hilarious to one person is not funny to another. So how can we recognize what is funny and what is not? Kate Clinton answered the question on the same FAQ page on her Official Website when she said, “I shamelessly test line on my friends. They’re onto me now, ‘You’re doing that thing again.’ ‘Is this for a show?’ I also rip funny lines right out of my friend’s mouths at dinner. Sometimes there’s still half-chewed bits of corn stuck on them. If I laugh out loud or slap my desk when I write it, there’s a chance it might be funny.”