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Vol. 13#7
Dead Girl Talking
By Amy RaNae Wilson
When you ask Amber Benson about the decidedly gay turn her career has taken, she shrugs. “I have so many friends who are gay,” she says. “It’s just so normal to me, and it’s such a part of my life that it doesn’t seem like I’m doing anything special.” Her fans might disagree. A recent string of gay-themed projects — most notably, her role as doomed lesbian witch Tara on television’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer — has earned the 26-year-old actor-writer-director a large and loyal queer following.
So has her personality. Exuding a down-to-earth Southern charm, minus the accent (her father never let her say “Y’all” as a child), the Birmingham, Ala., native is known as one of the nicest and most unaffected people in Hollywood. This is, after all, a woman who once got down on all fours at a swank Tinseltown party to help a waitress clean up a spilled tray. But she shrugs that off, too. “I’m not trying to be nicer than other people. … I’m human and I’m fallible and I fuck up a lot,” she says.
Maybe. But there is no denying the girl has character.
Dangerous Mix
By Zak Szymanski
“Woman Raped After Leaving Bar,” the April announcement declared, following an alleged incident outside a lesbian-frequented San Francisco dance club known for its mixed LGBT crowd. A visitor to the city reported that after feeling sick and trying to hail a cab, three men accosted her, took her to an unknown location and sexually assaulted her for several hours, all the while using antilesbian slurs.
The public alert was issued by a local agency, Community United Against Violence (CUAV), a nonprofit organization that tracks hate crimes and domestic abuse within queer communities. The alleged rape was downplayed by the media, including the gay press, because reporters were suspicious of the victim’s account. But to groups like CUAV and fellow member organizations that make up the LGBT-specific National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), the victim’s story was all too typical of an underreported crime within LGBT circles: assault and/or robbery as a result of involuntary drugging.
Whether dropped into a drink or disguised as a recreational substance, the use of so-called “date-rape drugs” in gay bars is on the rise, according to Avy Skolnik, direct services coordinator of the Colorado Anti-Violence Program. Queer sexual assaults as a result of involuntary drugging experienced a statistical climb in the Denver area at the beginning of 2003, prompting his agency to draft an article for the local gay newspaper.
Throwing Shade
By Rebecca Jane Alber
An emotional vocalist, Hersh seems to sing every song as if it might be her very last. Her raspy, up-all-night wail of a voice erupts from way down. Her lyrics are purely confessional, yet cool — spilling over with words most of us fear to utter. Hersh jabs with her music. Not so much at others (lovers and ex-bandmates aside), but at herself. A self-described music junkie, Hersh has found music to be both vice and release, as well as a personal muse that has guided her through years of mental illness (she suffers from a bipolar condition).
Women to Watch in Film
By Diane Anderson-Minshall
I’d be the first to claim Nina Jacobson as a cinematic lesbian’s dream. President of Buena Vista Motion Pictures Group, Jacobson greenlit the summer’s biggest (and girl-friendliest) hits — Freaky Friday (with Jamie Lee Curtis) and Finding Nemo (with Ellen DeGeneres) — and helped her empire garner over $600 million. But who are filmdom’s up-and-comers? You asked; we answered.
Striptease
By Amanda Hollinger; Photography by Meg Reilley
“We had no idea when we got together last November, carrying bags of feather boas and underwear and learning basic dance moves, that this would become so big,” says Ami Worthen, who plays Allison Wonderpants in the Rebelles, a new all-female burlesque troupe that has taken the small Southern town of Asheville, N.C., by storm.
The Rebelles (emphasis on “belles”) opened its original production, Through Sick and Sin, over last summer’s July 4 weekend to sold-out crowds that lined up around the block. The second run over the Labor Day weekend sold out in less than 24 hours. Fans showed up in lawn chairs to wait in line for tickets. A similar phenomenon occurred when the troupe played their first out-of-town performance in Chapel Hill, N.C.
“What attracted me to burlesque is the way it lampoons popular culture, politics, and sex — topics and issues that are taboo,” says Christine DiBenedetto, Rebelles founder.
The Rebelles’ motto is: “For a good cause, wrongdoing may be virtuous.” When burlesque first emerged in the 1920s, it challenged traditional images of women who still wore corsets and lacked the right to vote.
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