L is for Leisha
Advocate
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As The L Word’s only out lesbian cast member, Leisha Hailey is surrounded by
hot women (and men) in the sexiest new show since Queer as Folk. Welcome to
Showtime’s steamy new hit
By Dennis Hensley
Excerpted from The Advocate, February 17, 2004

As ambassadors to Lesbianville go, it’s hard to imagine a better choice than
Leisha Hailey. We first fell in love with her pixieish charm when she was one
half of the pop-rock duo the Murmurs, West Coast favorites with three albums to
their credit. In the late 1990s we saw her on the arm of lesbian sex symbol k.d.
lang. (The couple ended their relationship three years ago after nearly five
years.) In 1997 Hailey made her own splash as an actor, playing an out and proud
rocker in the popular indie All Over Me. And wait a minute, wasn’t that Leisha
Hailey looking so cute and so gay in that long-running series of Yoplait yogurt
commercials? Yep.

And all that was before Hailey became the one out lesbian cast member on The L
Word, Showtime’s super new drama about the lives and loves of a mostly queer
gaggle of Los Angeles women that premiered in January to the kind of national
buzz TV is just not supposed to get anymore.

Hailey is brimming over with excitement. “The L Word is one of the top five
things I’m most proud of in my life. I feel so honored to be a part of this
movement,” says the 32-year-old actress over tea and cookies in a Melrose
Avenue café in Los Angeles. “I feel like I’m a part of something really
big, something that can help millions of people understand what it’s like to
be gay, curious, bisexual, transgendered.”

Her key role in the gay cultural zeitgeist was affirmed recently when Hailey was
asked to take part in a skin-soaked 24-person photo shoot for Vanity Fair’s
cover story on “TV’s Gay Heat Wave.” To Hailey’s delight, one of the
other models was her childhood idol, Sharon Gless, who now costars on Queer as
Folk—the Showtime series that arguably built the queer heat wave into a
tsunami.
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When Hailey was a young gay girl growing up in Fellview, Neb., Gless meant
plenty. “When I was in, like, ninth grade,” Hailey reminisces, “I remember
running home every day after school to watch Cagney & Lacey just to get the gay
fix.”

Given that Hailey is the only out lesbian in the show’s principal cast, it’s
ironic that her character, Alice Pieszecki, a spunky journalist who’s always
ready with a well-timed quip about such subjects as “nipple confidence” and
the debauchery of Dinah Shore weekend, is the show’s one avowed bisexual.
It’s a calling Hailey takes seriously.

“I want to represent bisexuals as well as I want the straight girls on the
show to represent lesbians,” says the actress, who read up on bisexuality
before shooting began. “I’ve really come to learn that bisexuality is a
true, legitimate sexual orientation. It’s not about crossing over from
straight to gay, which is an idea that Alice has to argue a lot with her
friends. They all want her to stay in their camp, but Alice is looking for love,
and she literally doesn’t care if it ends up being with a man or a woman. I
think that’s beautiful.”

For out executive producer and series creator Ilene Chaiken—whose other
credits include the Showtime movies Damaged Care and Dirty Pictures (about the
censorship furor over the homo-graphic photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe) as
well as the Pamela Anderson vehicle Barb Wire—getting The L Word on the air
was a dream five years in the making. “Back then, I knew nobody would ever go
on this ride with me,” says Chaiken, who lives in Los Angeles with her
architect partner of 20 years and their twin 8-year-old girls. “When I sensed
that the time was right, I told Showtime my stories, and they just said, ‘Yes,
we’ve got to do this.’ ”

Chaiken allows that the breakout success of Queer as Folk kicked open the door
for her show, but she hopes audiences won’t regard The L Word as just a
lesbian knockoff of QAF. “That comparison is inevitable,” she says, “and
to the extent that it gets people there, I welcome it. But I really believe that
when people see the show, they’ll see that it couldn’t be more different.”

Hensley is the author of Screening Party (Alyson Publications).

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