From Salon:
… Fans who recall her earlier career know that actress and comic pioneer Lily Tomlin spent much of it circumspect about her sexuality. Sure, she openly acknowledged her collaborator Jane Wagner; she narrated the documentary “The Celluloid Closet” in 1995. But last year, Michael Musto said that Armistead Maupin, who wrote the narration for the film, had been displeased with “the absurdity of having a closeted person like her narrate” it. Tomlin didn’t officially come out until a 2000 interview with New York City cable-access TV program Gay USA. Back then, she explained, “I’m not going to make a big national case of it which is what, really, everybody would like to do, or some people. But in most articles, most people refer to Jane as my partner or my life-partner or whatever … We’ve been around so long and been through so much and I always kind of took a lot of stuff for granted. I also never wanted to be anybody’s spokesperson or poster person. You know, I see what happens to too many people.” A year earlier, she told Denver’s Out Front, “I never officially came out in any kind of really public way. I just always lived very simply and openly, but the press has never made a big fuss about me or said anything to me.”…
But on Monday evening, a mere 40 years after sitting down with Carson, she was eager to talk about her relationship and her plans. At an Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Pre-Emmy Performers Peer Group reception, Tomlin, who turns 74 in September, noted proudly that she and her 78-year-old partner, Wagner, have been together for 42 years. Then later, she revealed to E! that “We’re thinking maybe we’ll get married.” Calling the recent strides toward marriage equality “pretty remarkable,” she added, “You don’t really need to get married, but marriage is awfully nice. Everybody I know who got married, they say it really makes a difference. They feel very, very happy about it.”…
More anecdotes at the link.
The legalisms and the ceremony, ridiculous as they are, do make a difference. The Spousal Unit and I had been, shall we call it, dating for fifteen years — and sharing a house for sixteen — when we finally went through the formalities. We didn’t intend to have kids, we’d already bought our first house together, so apart from the not insignificant legal issues like joint taxes & health insurance we didn’t “have” to get married. And yet, after the confetti… well, we celebrated our twentieth offical anniversary at the beginning of the month. I hope Mss. Tomlin & Wagner get to do that, too.
Warren Terra
A slightly belated Happy Anniversary to you.
Yatsuno
I’m so weird. I get the marriage bug, then it fades. The fact that the NYD is pretty much the same way helps my sinful demeanor. Of course now that it’s legal my mom is giving me subtle nudges.
NotMax
Nothing against her successes, but Tomlin, comedically and theatrically, has always left me utterly cold.
Villago Delenda Est
@NotMax:
Oh, please. Surely the fabulous Ernestine (“We’re the phone company. We don’t care. We don’t have to.”) brought a smile to your face.
WereBear
Happy Anniversary, Anne Laurie!
As with so many other things in life, it is far better as a choice.
Anne Laurie
@Yatsuno: I never had ‘the marriage bug’, not even after we’d decided to go through the whole ridiculous circus. And yet, things still felt different the morning after we were handfasted, in front of many of our friends & a select group of relatives, by an old friend consecrated in the Church of the Goddess and authorized with a letter signed by then-governor Bill Weld. The effect of ritual on the primate mind is strange & powerful…
ruemara
I love Lily! I was wondering what the story was, since I saw a bit of her face on some of the news sites. Very happy for her. I dunno about marriage for myself. I just got out of an 18 year relationship and I hardly spent any time not being in a relationship since I was 16. Marriage always seemed like it was for other people. I wasn’t ever the girl who played bride. Seemed like a perfectly good way to curtail your freedom, be stuck keeping house and have some icky boy messing up things and clinging all over you, blech. I preferred the idea of being a Jedi elf ranger and right now, it kinda sounds like a much better plan, since I was right about the downsides.
AxelFoley
Wow. didn’t know Ms. Tomlin was gay.
AxelFoley
@NotMax:
What? 9 to 5 was cinematic gold, dude. She was great in that movie, as was Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Dabney Coleman.
Yatsuno
@Anne Laurie: If it happens at all, it’s after he’s done with law school. Which he starts next month. And by then I should be done as far as surgeries go and such.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@AxelFoley:
You aren’t kidding, are you? I think I had it figured out in the late ’70s.
The prophet Nostradumbass
Have any of you watched any of the new Al Jazeera America channel? I watched it a bit this evening, and it’s already an improvement over Current, both technically, and in terms of content. No Cenk Uygur alone is a step up.
NotMax
@Villago Delenda Est
@AxelFoley
Nope.
Diff’rent strokes and all that, but never raised so much as the suggestion of a glimmer of a smile from those.
It’s not even that I dislike her shtick – it is something my personal filters have always reacted to by automatically tuning her out whenever she shows up.
eemom
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Good evening, Nostra.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
It’s Count Basie’s 109th birthday!
Every Day I Have the Blues
Lester Leaps In
For Lena and Lennie
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Goin’ To Chicago Blues (Joe Williams and LH&R, not Jimmy Rushing)
piratedan
http://editorial.autos.msn.com/tesla-model-s-gets-best-nhtsa-safety-rating-ever?icid=autos_4638&ocid=ansauto11
neato!
TheMightyTrowel
Technically Mr. Trowel and I have been married almost 2 years. Neither of our families knows. We did the deed with a justice of the peace and two friends because we figured it would help with visas etc down the line. We’ve been together 8 years. the marriage changed nothing. i think honestly the ritual thing changes things only if you’re looking for something to change. just my 2 cents.
bago
@Yatsuno: However the NSA expanded so rapidly that audit trails were deprioritized in the Software Development Lifecycle. You’re a Fed. You have a pension to look forward to. Snowden is a contractor with the keys to the castle.
It’s like MBA types are only concerned with the next quarter, instead of thinking that a fireable contractor might be a security risk.
TriassicSands
You see, the reason why we shouldn’t allow same sex marriage and the reason why homosexuals should never be allowed to be parents is because, obviously, they can’t form stable relationships.
Betty Cracker
Congrats, AL!
@TheMightyTrowel: I think one of the factors that makes marriage “a thing” is the public aspect of it — the acknowledgement of the state, family, friends, etc., of the relationship’s ultimate legitimacy. Not that this can’t be achieved by other means or is even important or necessary to every couple. But for many, that’s what makes it “different,” I think.
O/T: Major insomnia here because I recently had to chase down and slay a hand-sized spider. I generally have a live and let live policy toward spiders and will try to capture and release them outside if we can’t coexist. But this giant-ass motherfucker came at me fast, so I had to break a broom on him/her.
OzarkHillbilly
I too, did not know Ms Tomlin was gay. To be honest, it had never occurred to me to wonder.
I got married to my 2nd wife for the plain and simple reason that when I die, whether tomorrow, 10 yrs from now, or whenever, if I am unmarried the union takes my pension. At the time she had been putting up with me for app 6 yrs. I figured she had earned it. Now, 5 years later, I realize she is going to be grossly under compensated. I definitely got the better end of that deal.
raven
She’s funny, that’s all I need to know.
geg6
I support the right of everyone, gay or straight, to marry. That said, I have no desire to do it myself. Spent 18 mostly good years (with the exception of the last year) with my ex without ever seeing the need. And John and I are coming up on year six and I still can’t imagine why we’d need to spend a bunch of money to get a piece of paper to formalize our happiness.
That said, congratulations to you and your husband, AL, and to the Mss. Wagner and Tomlin. Long term stable relationships of all kinds rock.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Sucks when you’ve gotta do that. I had two big fat gray ladies with webs over an archway. Couldn’t get myself to screw with ’em. I had Charlotte’s Web running through my brain. Someone else saw ’em and took action. Wilbur wept. Some pig.
TheMightyTrowel
@Betty Cracker: I hear your pain with giant spiders. Australia is seething with them and they make my life a misery. I know it’s spring because I found my first huntsman of the year last weekend. Ugh.
Re: public nature…. I guess? but then, that’s the same thing, people who go in for the public marriage want that public acclaim/support/recognition. That’s a choice they make and that they get a good result and they feel their relationship is changed for it is excellent for them, but I don’t think that that just ‘happens’ and somehow the relationship changes because you signed some paper and did it with people watching. Changes happen because people seek them out. That is a context which is too often elided in comments about how ‘getting married’ somehow ‘changed the relationship’.
I love other people’s weddings. That my friends are happy in their relationships is something I’m really really pleased about, but at the same time, I don’t find the idea of having a public ceremony like that appealing in the least. I am lucky to have been able to access a number of rights which are more or less internationally recognised because my current partner is male and a government official signed a piece of paper. That people (smug marrieds?) will point out (smugly) that, THEY never thought about getting married but the marriage CHANGED IT ALL (as if by magic) can often be used as a weapon (not always! not always!) to poke at people who do not conform to the heteronormative monogamous ideal or who do not buy into the selling-the-virgin-bride imagery of the modern western wedding with all it’s overpriced, status-laden crap.
[rant over]
NotMax
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Back when I used to own a large van, would have to remove tenacious webbing strung between the aerial and the windshield wipers every morning.
Had to use the vehicle daily, but harbored a suspicion that if I could only leave it untouched for two weeks, it would have become cocooned and hatched out a Bentley.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@TheMightyTrowel: Some years ago, I read about a researcher who had found that most, but not all, human brains have a specific activity in reaction to religious activity. I used to keep a copy handy for the inevitable bafflement from an ardent theist when faced with anyone who insisted that he had never had any experience of the numinous.
Apparently, some people just aren’t wired for ritual.
raven
You get married you don’t get married. Who cares?
NotMax
“What kind of world are we living in if the governments of the world think total surveillance is an appropriate thing?”
Fallout.
TriassicSands
@raven:
The Republican Party. The Catholic Church. And a few others.
Randy P
Many years ago I saw Lily Tomlin on stage in a one woman show, “The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe”. Hilarious, and I always wondered why she didn’t do more stuff like that. My favorite movie of hers is a silly little thing called “The Incredible Shrinking Woman” with Charles Grodin. I love that what causes her to shrink is a combination of chemicals that an ordinary housewife is exposed to daily.
“Universe” was the first time I heard the name Jane Wagner. I just thought, ok that’s her writing partner and didn’t bother speculating otherwise. Why should I care one way or the other? But how cool if she can get married.
Keith G
@Anne Laurie: Thirty-one years and a few weeks. Cool beans.
Randy P
@NotMax: Whenever I have to machete my way through the webs to get in my own door, what comes to mind is the Far Side cartoon with the two spiders stringing a web across the bottom of a sliding board. “If we pull this off, we’ll eat like kings!”
MomSense
@Betty Cracker: @TheMightyTrowel:
Wait, what?? Giant spiders? HAND SIZED SPIDERS??? I was thinking, happy thoughts about marriages and love and now this. Just decided I will not complain about winter ever again.
beth
I saw her one woman show years ago and during the Q&A portion afterwards, she invited a young teen boy up on stage because he said he wanted to be a comedian and she was one of his idols. She let him tell a few jokes, bantered a little and then told him he could put “performed with Lily Tomlin” on his resume. She was very sweet and gentle with him.
Betty Cracker
@MomSense: Experience the horror. I actually don’t mind the spiders so much as long as they stay away from me. It’s the palmetto bugs (giant, indestructible, flying cockroaches) I hate.
beth
@Betty Cracker: I got into bed once, unfolded the covers and was staring straight at one of those under the folded bedspread. I think I jumped 8 feet straight up off the bed and across the room. It was the beginning of the end of my residence in Florida.
MazeDancer
Happy Anniversary, Anne Laurie! Two decades is certainly a milestone worth celebrating. Plus another decade and a half. Congratulations!
Also lovely news about Lily Tomlin and her possibly soon to be bride. Everyone of these people who have been in love forever and now they can get married if they so choose brings such a happy “awwww” response. Doesn’t matter if they are famous or not, it is just so inspiring and heart warming to hear about people being happy and in love for so long, and now they can be celebrated publicly the way they always deserved.
MomSense
@Betty Cracker:
Holy Tamales!!! I just got the shivers/heebie jeebies/ants in my pants/swiping madly at imaginary spiders CREEPS! I think I would shut the door on my house and leave for good. I would rather deal with the EEE mosquitoes we have here in NNE.
aimai
@geg6: Its horses for courses. I didn’t get married until I’d been with Mr. Aimai for about five years. We were together after the first six months of dating but then were living long distance–Berkeley to Atlanta–for several years. Deciding to get married was both a leap of faith and a conscious choice. Not about a “piece of paper” or a religious thing at all but a decision to make a go of it as a couplemaking decisions for the two of us (where to live, how to live, what work we took) that could not longer be made separatly. Because we were really living seperatly every time a job offer came up, or even dinner out, you didn’t have to refer to your coupleness much. Choosing to be together took precendence over career and other life issues.
I can honestly say, like Anne Laurie, that the difference the day after deciding to go ahead (i.e. absurdly being engaged) and before was like night and day. Not less stressful, sometimes more stressful, but more conscious and more together. We still had lots of decisions that scanted one person’s interests in favor of the interest of the duo but those were good training for becoming parents, actually.
We have been together 23 ? years, married 18. Nothing paper about it.
Patricia Kayden
@Betty Cracker: “hand-sized spider”? I’d have to run screaming from the room and spray it from a distance with raid. You’re brave.
Emma
@Patricia Kayden: And she hasn’t even mentioned the 747-sized cockroaches. Right now they are invading our house because it’s been raining heavily and they just don’t like it wet. Neither do the ants. Last week I woke up to find a line of ants descending from the window sill and straight into my bed.
Florida — the insect paradise.
Butch
@Randy P: Randy, I was trying to remember the name of that play. I saw it at the Kennedy Center during the brief, unhappy period when I was living in DC.
But that being said, some friends just drove to Iowa to get married, since we can’t do it here in our home state. We’re thinking that after 21 years together it might be time for us, too.
Thlayli
And that’s the truth *thbbbt*
aimai
I saw The Search For Intelligent Life when she was first performing it, live, a long, long time ago on stage in Boston. Can’t remember where. We laughed so hard I thought we would die of lack of breath. I well remember that it was a HUGE deal that she thanked her “writing partner” Jane whatever her name is but at the time I think only people in the know knew that that was code for her lesbian lover. It was actually reported as a big deal because she was giving credit, as a comedian, to her writing partner which (supposedly) wasn’t often done. Maybe its hard for people younger than 50 to grasp just how down low all of this was kept at the same time that it was hiding in plain sight.
Another Holocene Human
@NotMax: I didn’t like her work on Sesame Street and only later found out that she’d done stuff that was actually good.
Comedians on kids’ shows often strike out. Carlin as Mr Conductor was all kinds of awful.
Another Holocene Human
@Anne Laurie: I might feel differently about being married if the IRS started treating us differently on tax day.
Until then… it did mean something to me to have a clerk from City Hall in The Auld Village marry me to my wife … but then we went home.
The sad thing is, a lot of my coworkers think that we have the same legal standing as them and they couldn’t be more wrong. Opposition to same sex marriage is a mile wide and an inch deep, unfortunately that inch votes reflexively when preachers make it the test of your Christiantude.
Another Holocene Human
@ruemara: I think you’d make an awesome Jedi elf ranger.
“These are not the derailing techniques you’re looking for.
You’re wasting your life.
Go home and unplug mom’s modem.”
Another Holocene Human
@AxelFoley: I didn’t know anyone didn’t know … oh well.
It does strike me that “not making a big deal of it” is a little privilegy and selfish. It would have been far easier for her to come out in the late 1990s than Ellen DeGeneres … who did … and paid for it, terribly.
Another Holocene Human
@AxelFoley: Trudat.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Villago Delenda Est: I always thought Ernestine and that motto would have been the perfect public face of the Cheney administration.
Carson comes off like a dick in that story. Disappointing.
CaseyL
Mazel tov to the happy couple!
Tomlin’s done excellent work, but she’s also done one undisputed stinker: “Moment by Moment,” in which she plays a wealthy woman who has an affair with a young drifter named Strip, who was played by John Travolta.
I don’t know if the fault was with the writing, or the directing, or what. But in order to buy the story, you had to buy the chemistry between Tomlin and Travolta, and there just wasn’t any. Or maybe it was their styles: both play kind of minimalist deadpan. Hard to convey irresistible passion when neither of ’em lights up.
Maybe things heated up later on in the film. I gave up and stopped watching about 10? minutes in.
(And, no, I don’t believe anyone’s sexual orientation had anything to do with it. Gay actors have “played straight” for generations, and convinced audiences they were the hottest heteros on the planet, on- and off-screen.)
Jamey
They’ve been together 42 years and are thinking of getting married? Isn’t that rushing things a bit?
The Moar You Know
Not a fan of Tomlin as is NotMax above, and for the same reasons. However, good for her for finding happiness. That’s hard.
And yeah, marriage changes things, more than I realized when I finally decided to do it in my mid-40s. Glad I did it. I gotta say it’s not for everyone; my wife’s parents and my own being some textbook examples.
Felonius Monk
Anne Laurie: Wishing you and Unit a Happy Anniversary, albeit a few days late.
Somebody upthread mentioned Al-Jazeera America. Our cable doesn’t carry it – TWC dropped Current like a hot potato when it was sold. Hopefully, they will reconsider. I did check it out online and it looks interesting. Probably is good since FuksNoise has already been very critical.
aimai
Forgotten wonderful movie: All of Me with Lily Tomlin and Steve Martin.
Mike in NC
Lily was really good in “Damages”.
drkrick
@Another Holocene Human: I’m not getting why anyone is obligated to make a public stand if they choose not to. How is that demand any less obnoxious than the demand to stay in the closet unwillingly? Also, why would it be any easier for Tomlin to take the stand at any given time than it was for Ellen?
sparrow
@drkrick: I agree. If the societal environment has openly hostile elements towards you, I don’t think you are “obligated” to take that on. Some people will, and these are the “unreasonable people” that we honor for moving us forward. But demanding all gay people come out, especially back when it could kill your career? I think not.
Quaker in a Basement
Wow. It took 57 comments before anyone referenced “All of Me”? Who are you people? (Tomlin was great in that, as was Richard Libertini: “Back in bowl? Nim!”)
Tomlin is the author of what has become my personal motto: “I try to be cynical, but I can’t keep up.”
Paul in KY
Will just note that Ms. Tomlin is a Louisville, KY native. Town is very proud of her accomplishments.
Jay in Oregon
Lily Tomlin looks better at 74 then a lot of people I know half her age.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Holocene Human: The one true Mr. Conductor was Ringo Starr. His speech can only be correctly transcribed with capitalization resembling A. A. Milne in a particularly enthusiastic mood. “If you’ve Come to Wash the Windows, they ‘aven’t ‘ad Time to get Dirty!”
Matt McIrvin
@aimai: To Samantha and me, for some reason it wasn’t a huge emotional difference, either being engaged or being married. It made some change in how people treated us, I suppose, and we got to throw a peculiar wedding with barbecue, volleyball and horseshoes. But we’d been living together for a couple of years, and I suppose we had already slid into something like a married-couple mindset without the convenient legal status.
Arundel
@Another Holocene Human: Ellen Degeneres may have had some setbacks after coming out, but “she suffered terribly” really is a vast overstatement. She’s currently a pretty beloved national figure, with a massively successful talk show, Kennedy Center honors, hosted the Oscars twice, has like-ability ratings through the roof, a beautiful wife, and is worth over a $100 million. She definitely took a risk, and it was a big deal at the time; but it’s been worth it, her coming out was a milestone in the acceptance of gays and lesbians that we happily have today.
Lily Tomlin is from a different generation, a different person than Ellen. Times were very different at the height of her TV/film career , and it would have been beyond difficult to come out. If not disastrous for her career, the country wasn’t ready. And perhaps she actually is a very private person. Everyone comes out in their own way, I suppose.