We went in search of famous lesbians from decades past to find out what they’re up to now, see whether they’re still dykes (a bunch of them aren’t), and learn how they feel about the legacy of their contributions to queer culture.


THE GLITTERATI:

Jenny Shimizu

Model-turned-actress Jenny Shimizu was discovered in the early 1990s as a tattoo-wielding, motorcycle-driving chick magnet. She was out, she was hot and she became a supermodel almost overnight. Then she was linked with half of Hollywood’s hottest, including Angelina Jolie (who fell for her during the filming of Foxfire). In the late 1990s, Ione Skye — who was married to Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz — announced on the Howard Stern Show that she was in love with the exotic beauty. (Apparently that infatuation didn’t take, since Skye had a child later with architect David Nettis.)

Now post-rehab, Shimizu is back again. Her turns on TV (remember Ellen’s coming out?) and in videos and small films have brought her full circle. Shimizu appears in Todd Hughes’ hilarious post-apocalyptic sci-fi retelling of a film classic, The New Women, slated for the festival circuit this year. In the movie, Mary Woronov (of Eating Raoul fame) and a small group of women wake up in a world where all the men are in comas (though they get erections every 45 minutes). The women hit the road, and follow a shaky radio signal to a new model of society, made by women for women, called Elysium. Along the way, they find new-age hippie chicks and angry lady bikers, and lo and behold, Jenny Shimizu as a hot number named Lemongrass. The casting is telling, too; queer director Hughes was really the person who discovered Shimizu — casting her, fittingly enough, as a supermodel in his 1995 film Ding Dong, a hard-to-find, fast-paced farce featuring four lesbians, two couples and no survivors (the tagline, in fact, was “Door-to-door makeovers, madness, and murder”).

Wendy and Lisa

You had to be asleep in the ’80s not to hear about Prince’s backup singers Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman — known to fans simply as Wendy and Lisa. They sang together, played together and, in Purple Rain, a movie quip refers to the girls as “queerer than a two-dollar bill.” Thus, they became lesbian icons.

After the Revolution ended, the girls released a solo album dubbed Wendy and Lisa and a year later followed up with Fruit at the Bottom. The duo has kept making music, appearing on albums by Seal, bi crooner Meshell Ndegeocello, and Joni Mitchell, as well as on the Dangerous Minds and Toys soundtracks. They even sang the theme song to Gina Gershon’s TV show Snoops and composed the score to 1997’s Soul Food. (Their 1995 album Erotica had a lesbo-friendly feel, too, with guest vocals by k.d. lang.) Now two of the most sought-after studio musicians in Hollywood, Wendy and Lisa perform independently (Wendy played guitar on lang’s recent Invincible Summer CD) and together (under the band name Girl Brothers). Their self-titled 1998 album (which dealt with the drug overdose death of Wendy’s brother — a Smashing Pumpkins bandmate) was praised far and wide. They aren’t lovers, just friends, but even so, the duo appeared on Rhino’s compilation album Women Like Us: Lesbian Favorites.


THE ACCIDENTAL ACTIVISTS:

Lynn Duff

Just a 16-year-old gay kid, Lynn Duff grabbed national attention over a decade ago when she escaped from a Utah-based psychiatric institute called Rivendell. Duff’s plight brought national attention to these reparative-therapy clinics and the plight of queer kids being forced to undergo aversion therapy. (Ten years after, the phenom was spoofed in the lesbian-made film But I’m a Cheerleader.) After a lengthy battle, Duff went to live with found foster parents in San Francisco and started 24-7, a zine for kids who have been locked up.

After Duff started college, she spent the first few years helping other escapee kids, but a police raid on her apartment a few years ago ended her underground railroad days. “I wasn’t there at the time, so I wasn’t arrested, but the kid they nabbed, who was underage, was taken to a lock-up,” Duff recalls. She now works as a counselor at a homeless youth shelter in Oakland, Calif., is finishing her master’s degree in theology, and is pondering a move to Israel.

Duff hasn’t seen her own mother in more than 10 years, and she argues with critics who say the situation has changed. “Kids are still being locked up and mistreated. Parents still have the right to have their kid tortured at a for-profit residential treatment center,” she rails. “Since the mid-90s, these programs have found an even more effective way to circumvent the laws. Instead of sending kids to Utah or Montana to shock-treat them back into submission, now American programs have established centers overseas, in Samoa and Mexico. They’re like POW camps.”

Norma McCorvey

She just happened to be the woman at the center of the most contentious sociopolitical issue of the last quarter-century. Norma McCorvey was a pregnant, 22-year-old, ninth-grade dropout who was abused as a kid, raped as a teen and beaten by her husband when she was just 16. In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled on her case, Roe v. Wade, and the decision legalized abortion nationwide.

Though McCorvey later became an alcoholic and drug abuser, she came out as a lesbian in the mid-1980s with her autobiography I Am Roe: My Life, Roe v. Wade, and Freedom of Choice. Once out, she worked at several abortion clinics and had a long-term lesbian lover. Then, McCorvey says, after 28 years of guilt-induced drug binges, she jumped to the other side. “Being ‘Jane Roe’ and working in the reality of death at various abortion clinics, it began to eat away at my soul,” she claims. “God was my saving grace that literally saved my life.”

In 1995, McCorvey joined Operation Rescue and two years later founded Roe No More Ministry, a nonprofit dedicated to her new pro-life mission. She also wrote another autobiography, Won By Love, in which she explains how her work in the abortion industry led her to drug use and suicide attempts.

But is she still a lesbian? McCorvey says she hasn’t had any kind of relationship since 1991 and hasn’t met many gay women who’ve been moved by her pro-life mission. “Just about everyone I know in the pro-life [movement] is straight,” she says. “I did, however, meet a woman some years ago who told me at a dinner she had had a lesbian relationship, so I asked her to repent and that was about it.”

Sharon Bottoms

In one of the most important legal cases in the last three decades, Sharon Bottoms lost custody of her child in 1995 to her mother because Bottoms is a lesbian and therefore a criminal under Virginia’s sodomy law. After an extended appeal, Bottoms gained visitation, but not with lover April Wade in tow. Bottoms’ story was turned into a television movie and a media flurry focused on the movie’s proceeds. (Bottoms’ mother claimed her daughter’s inability to save money was additional proof that she was unfit.)

Sharon Kowalksi and Karen Thompson

In 1983, Sharon Kowalski’s car was hit by a drunk driver and she fell into a coma for several months. When she awoke, she was quadriplegic and brain-damaged. Her lover, Karen Thompson, then a closeted academic, began an eight-year battle for custody of Kowalski. When the Minnesota courts refused to acknowledge they were life partners, Kowalski was placed against her wishes into her father’s care and the two women were separated for three years.

Thompson quickly became an activist, as much for the differently abled as for lesbian and gay couples, and penned the book Why Can’t Sharon Kowalksi Come Home? In 1991, Thompson won custody of Kowalski. These days, Kowalski’s family has softened a bit, something they’ve discussed in workshops and in books like Restricted Access: Lesbians on Disability.

“My family is now a family of three,” says Thompson, who has a new partner, Patty Bresser. “At one time, I would have fought for different things,” she admits. “Now I fight for people’s rights to define families. Traditional families don’t work with people with disabilities. We need to look at other structures.”

Thompson, a very out professor at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, says their lives are “pretty normal.” Kowalksi attends an adult day-care program each day, speaks with a speech synthesizer, and stands every evening, using a supportive frame (“The medical community never thought we’d get her back on her feet again,” Thompson says). “It’s been a journey,” Thompson admits, “but we are happier than we ever dreamed we’d be.” The women still get mail from people who want to know if Kowalksi has come home.

Thompson says she became an activist because she had to. “When I got Sharon home, I thought I could go back to a quiet life. But, I did grow. I did change,” she says, adding that she’s ready to leap back into the public arena. Thompson says that now that they feel safe and secure, she’s contemplating a second book and has started doing more workshops on anti-ableism and diversity. The three women recently held a workshop at NGLTF’s Creating Change conference.


THE LESBIAN FIRSTS:

Ann Bannon

When Ann Bannon sat down in suburban Philadelphia to pen the first novel in her Beebo Brinker Chronicles, she was a 20-something housewife. She churned out several lesbian pulp novels and, before she even realized what was happening, they had become classics. Her first novel, Odd Girl Out, was the second best-selling paperback in 1957 — something Bannon herself didn’t realize until years later. They may have been pulp, but they were also earnest lesbian love stories. “I gave at least some of the stories a happy ending. Nobody had to be shot, or jump in front of a train, for the sin of being a lesbian,” Bannon recalls.

In the 1980s, Bannon’s Beebo series was discovered again by Naiad Press, who stripped away the pulp covers and re-released them to an adoring lesbian readership. Those Naiad books are collector’s editions (just look on Ebay) and now, 20 years later, Cleis Press is giving new life to Bannon’s work — republishing the early work, replete with their campy pulp covers.

“At Ann’s book signings, we see older women as well as younger readers, all of whom find something in the Beebo Brinker Chronicles,” says Cleis’ Don Weis. “Beebo Brinker, our first book in the new series, sold out its print run within the first year.” Beebo and Odd Girl Out have also become college reading material — more than 40 years after they were first published.

Bannon herself is as bemused as she is delighted by all the attention. Now retired, she lives in Sacramento, where she spent the last three decades as a professor and dean of humanities at a local university.

Gail Strickland

Aaron Spelling’s medical drama Heartbeat, launched in 1988, has oft been credited with being the first TV series to show lesbians in a positive light. Actress Gail Strickland played lesbian Marilyn McGraf — she was seen regularly with her lover Patty — until the show was pulled in 1989 (for low ratings, due in part to a protest campaign by fundamentalists). The venerable Strickland had also appeared on several other hit TV shows — including Dallas, Kojak, and Family Ties — and in movies like Protocol and Norma Rae. More recently, the 55-year-old Strickland has been working steadily — on hits like Seinfeld, ER, Melrose Place and Law and Order. She showed up as Yvonne in the queer comedy Three of Hearts and this year she’s playing Justice Deborah Szwark on the new TV series First Monday.

Robin Tyler

No stranger to controversy, Robin Tyler, born Arlene Chernick, was an early female impersonator. (“Why shouldn’t I be a female impersonator?” she asked on her first comedy album, Phyllis Schlafly Is.) In the early 1960s, she was the first to use the word “lesbian” on national television, having uttered the word on Phyllis Diller’s show. In the 1970s, ABC was reportedly grooming her and model Patti Harrison to be the next Smothers Brothers — and then she came out, making her the first openly gay standup comic on television. Her 1978 comedy album, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Groom, was the first openly queer comedy recording.

So where’s Tyler now? The Los Angeles-based activist and events organizer was the stage producer for the first three gay marches on Washington and was executive producer of the Millennium March on Washington — until she left after a very public dispute with the board. Still a shameless dyke entrepreneur, Tyler has spent the last two decades promoting women’s music festivals and lesbian cruises, and now hosts travel tours to places like Peru and Sydney’s Gay Games.


THE REMARKABLE WRITERS:

Joan Nestle

Joan Nestle’s collections of writings, A Restricted Country and 1998’s A Fragile Union, have garnered her legions of queer fans, but lesbians should thank her too for housing the Lesbian Herstory Archives in her apartment for more than 20 years. “Once a month, we would have an ‘At-Home with the Archives,’ where lesbian cultural workers would present their slide shows or films or songs or poems to groups that ranged from 10 to 150. For all the years the archives shared my apartment, my home was a public place,” recalls Nestle, now 61 and ailing from chemotherapy treatments.

Nestle, who came out as a femme dyke in the 1950s working-class bars of Greenwich Village, protested against the HUAC, Vietnam, nuclear war, segregation and apartheid, and marched for abortion rights and gay liberation. In 1973, she co-founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives; in 1979, she started writing erotic stories; and in 1982, she ran afoul of the anti-pornography movement, thus becoming a fervent pro-sex activist in the “sex wars” of the 1980s. She taught writing in the SEEK Program at Queens College from 1966 until cancer forced her retirement in 1995.

Don’t think Nestle is letting cancer hold her back, though. She’s still a feisty activist, demonstrating at the United Nations and railing against the current war on terrorism. “Wrapped in the nausea of chemotherapy, I must add my voice to all the others who know that when the government in this country is rushing to the militaristic, nationalistic right, rushing to the collapse of civil liberties, rushing into our own form of religious fundamentalism, now is the time when we must speak and act,” Nestle writes.

Jewelle Gomez

Author of the acclaimed The Gilda Stories and the stage play Bones and Ash, Jewelle Gomez first came to the public arena as a staffer of Say Brother, one of the first weekly black television shows in the United States. She co-founded GLAAD (along with Joan Nestle and Vito Russo) and now serves on a number of advisory boards, including the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

In addition to Gilda, she’s got three poetry collections under her belt (including the 1995 Oral Tradition), a book of political essays (Forty Three Septembers) and a collection of short fiction (1997’s Don’t Explain).

So what’s she doing these days? Gomez is working on a comic novel about black activists of the ’60s as they face middle age. She is also working with actor Harry Waters Jr. and director Arturo Catricala on a collaborative performance piece based on the life of author James Baldwin. Oh, and she was nominated to be San Francisco Pride Parade’s grand marshal this summer.


THE SEX RADICALS:

The Founders of On Our Backs

In 1984, then-couple Deborah Sundahl and Nan Kinney had a radical idea — to launch On Our Backs, a lesbian erotic magazine. They recruited friend Susie Bright and were on their way.

“On Our Backs,” says Bright, “was the first magazine by women about sex; it was the first openly lesbian magazine about anything, and it featured the first erotic women’s photography ever published in a magazine.” The magazine was always a firestorm for controversy during the height of the sex wars. It was also an internal quagmire. Kinney and Sundahl broke up and, in the mid-1990s, the magazine changed hands.

So what happened to those enterprising publishers?

Bright has become the wunderkind of women’s sexuality. Now the mother of a young daughter, Aretha, she’s written six books (including this year’s How to Write a Dirty Story), has edited 11 anthologies (including Best American Erotica), and teaches the politics of sexual representation at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Sundahl, who calls herself “straight with enduring ties to my sisters, straight, bi and gay,” produced and starred in the best-selling feminist video How to Female Ejaculate. Now based in New Mexico, she runs a media company, Isis Media, which focuses on female ejaculation and the G-spot — Sundahl’s new book on the subject will be out this fall. Her latest video, Tantric Journey to Female Orgasm, looks at the healing aspects of the G-spot and female ejaculation’s ancient, sacred history.

Kinney — working now with lover Christine Cassidy, Naiad Press’ senior editor for the last 12 years — has had her foot in many doors since her departure from the magazine (she even consulted on its resurrection under new ownership in the late 1990s). Nowadays, she’s selling and producing Fatale Videos — an offshoot from the On Our Backs days. She says the market for real lesbian videos has exploded with younger lesbians and the Internet. When the videos were first produced in the 1980s, few distributors carried them; even Good Vibrations didn’t carry movies until the early 1990s.

Kinney is also pushing the limits in terms of transgressive imagery. In 1998, she partnered with former On Our Backs editor Shar Rednour to make Bend Over Boyfriend — a sex-ed video about anal sex in which women penetrate men. “My goal has always been to present alternative images of sexuality,” says Kinney. “Now I’ve expanded the goal to include bisexual and heterosexual images as well.”

Lily Burana

Lily Burana wasn’t so much a sex radical as she was a sex goddess. In addition to editing Dagger, Burana became a fixture in San Francisco’s lesbian sex scene. She showed up as a pin-up on the cover of On Our Backs — an unabashed femme — and at local strip joints, where she became even more of an icon. Then she launched the queer zine Taste of Latex, redubbed herself a “polymorphously perverse mega-femme” in 1991, and briefly edited the magazine Future Sex.

Burana, who moved to New York in the mid-1990s, turned her days on the lesbian erotic scene into a career in the mainstream. Her writing appeared in The New York Times, GQ, Details, The Village Voice, Time, and Entertainment Weekly, and she joined the staff of both Spin and New York magazines as a contributing editor.

What’s she up to these days? You’d have to be blind to miss her. Burana’s debut book Strip City — creative nonfiction, she calls it — was released this year by Talk/Miramax. It has been garnering rave reviews and climbing the charts for months. The book doesn’t talk about her Taste of Latex days (“I decided that the book would be expressly about my life as a stripper”). But she doesn’t shy away from her lesbian life.

“The original editor of Strip City told me, in so many words, to take out the reference to my former girlfriend or he’d kill the book,” recalls Burana. “I was perfectly happy to have that publishing house kill the deal if it meant keeping the girl! I took the book back out to market, and sold it, as is, girlfriend and all, to Talk/Miramax within weeks. If my bad, rad, queer girl mentors taught me anything, it’s that you’ve got to hold your ground.”

Andrea Dworkin

OK, it may be more accurate to call her an anti-sex radical, but wherever sex radicals gather, the name Andrea Dworkin is sure to be mentioned. Dworkin, who said, “unambiguous conventional heterosexual behavior is the worst betrayal of our common humanity,” in her seminal 1974 book Woman Hating, has been one of the most controversial figures in popular culture. She’s been derided by men for her demeanor — she’s fat and she’s loud — and by pro-sex lesbians for her dogmatic diatribes. She’s been railing against pornography, turncoat feminists (“compromisers,” she calls them), and general patriarchy (she calls college “the archetypical brothel”) for almost 30 years.

So where is Dworkin now? Her newest book, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant, just hit bookstores. A collection of chronological writings about politics, Militant, talks about sexually predatory teachers, and rape and violence against women. She calls Allen Ginsberg a pedophile and talks of wishing him dead. She also rails against a junior-high English teacher who graded her with a B: “I knew I’d get her someday and this is it: Eat shit, bitch.”

Andrea has called her love of women “the soil in which my life is rooted,” though she’s lived with a man (writer John Stoltenberg) for more than 25 years. Dworkin, who once called for Susie Bright’s execution, got some unexpected sympathy last year. Dworkin claimed she was drugged and raped in a European hotel room — and Bright’s Salon essay was unexpectedly kind, though she noted, “Andrea Dworkin has made so many aware of how rape happens, and what its detailed circumstances are, that now when she cries ‘wolf,’ all her students such as myself are bound to look askance at her account.”

Pat Califia

Pat Califia was the formidable leather dyke who penned scores of books and became a leading lesbian figure in the proliferation of critical feminist theory. Her seminal work, Sapphistry: The Book of Lesbian Sexuality, came out in 1988, along with The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual. It was at the tail end of the sex wars, but both books still generated controversy. She followed up with novels (Macho Sluts), poetry (Diesel Fuel), essays (Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex), and more. Then she did something many lesbians in the heartland weren’t expecting. She became a he. Since transitioning from female to male, Patrick Califia has been at the vortex of a debate over the role of transgendered women and men in the lesbian community.

Though he’s been taking testosterone for three years and had chest surgery last year, Califia admits much of the debate over his gender has happened off his radar.

“I am also a parent, although my son no longer lives with me, through no choice of my own,” Califia admits. “The decision to become a father and the loss of my child have actually had a more profound effect on my life than the decision to bring my gender dysphoria further forward in my life and begin a gender transition. Caring for a child takes precedent over everything else. I’m aware that there’s a scandal out there about my transition, but I’m too busy right now grieving about Blake being taken away to a foreign country to be very aware of that controversy.”

Califia’s gender transition shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone reading his work. In 1997, he penned “Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism,” which last year appeared in Rough Stuff: Tales of Gay Men, Sex, and Power. But he’s still very aware of his role as a lesbian sex pioneer.

“When I identified as a lesbian, it was very important to me, both personally and politically, to make it easier for women to come out and to increase the amount of pleasure and fun in the dyke community,” Califia says. “Today, I am still proud of that work. I feel that it was worth every bit of the mud that was flung at me during the sex wars. No matter how I might want to express my own gender, the fact of women’s oppression remains one of the most important problems of our time.”


THE FAMOUS FELONS:

Joni Leigh Penn

Remember Joni Leigh Penn? She sent at least 100 letters to Cagney and Lacey’s Sharon Gless over two years in the late 1980s, including some with pictures of a gun. After the actress testified before the state legislature to encourage laws to make some records less accessible, the obsessed fan barricaded herself in Gless’ Hollywood mansion, armed with a rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition. She held off police for seven hours before her surrender and was sentenced to six years in prison. “I don’t think she wished me harm. She was in love with me,” Gless said in later years. “But it was perverse and anything might have happened.”

So what happened to these two women? Gless recovered from the incident, married boyfriend Barney Rosenzweig, got sober and now plays the ribald and flamboyant mother of a gay son on Queer as Folk. Penn, according to the California Department of Corrections, has remained an honest woman since her 1996 release.

Susan Saxe

Lesbian feminist icon Susan Saxe pled guilty to a lesser charge at trial for a 1970 bank robbery that included felony murder. (Her lover, Byrna Aronson, according to historian Dell Richards, was banned from the courtroom for outbursts during the trial.) The FBI had escalated its surveillance of lesbian feminist activities in the 1970s (a 1973 report claimed the newspaper Off Our Backs was “armed and dangerous — extremists”), so when anti-war fugitives Kathy Power and Susan Saxe were on the run, the bureau flooded womyn’s communities nationwide. When Saxe fled to Kentucky, several lesbians went to jail rather than divulge information about their community to the FBI.

Saxe later served several years in prison for her role. So where is Saxe now? While she didn’t return our calls or e-mails, she appears to be working in Pennsylvania as a Jewish and same-sex activist. She penned the manual Points to Consider in Counseling Same-Sex Couples for Marriage/Commitment Ceremonies for students in a local rabbinic program.


INFAMOUS EXES:

Judy Nelson

She wrote two tell-all books after her split with Martina Navratilova and had a brief affair with author Rita Mae Brown, as recounted in 1996’s Choices: My Journey After Leaving My Husband for Martina and a Lesbian Life. She tried her hand again at straight life (it didn’t take), and then she retreated to a more private life on a horse ranch, though she’s still active in local organizations.

JEB

Photographer (and Furies co-founder) Joan E. Biren (better known as JEB) had a very public relationship with author Minnie Bruce Pratt (in one early lesbian video, they’re interviewed while cuddling in bed). After their relationship ended, Pratt joined forces with transgendered author Leslie Feinberg. But what of JEB? She still documents the progress of women in the post-Stonewall era. Her photos can be found in her collections, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians and Making a Way: Lesbians Out Front. A 20-year retrospective of her work was recently exhibited at George Washington University’s Gelman Library.

“More than any other lesbian photographer working in the U.S. in the final decades of the 20th century, JEB has changed how lesbians are pictured,” said lesbian photographer and historian Tee Corinne. “JEB’s photographs brought to an international audience images of lesbians, face forward and identifiably lit, taking their places in the visual lexicon of an era.”

And the other exes? Pratt and Feinberg are still together. Feinberg is working on a novel entitled Drag King Dreams and putting together a book about transgender health issues called First Do No Harm. Pratt, now 56, has published four books of poetry to date as well as 1995’s provocative S/HE — which won numerous awards. Pratt now teaches women’s studies, lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender studies, and creative writing as a faculty member of the Union Institute, a non-residential alternative university. Their work, as well as their love story, is chronicled on Pratt’s Web site, www.mbpratt.org.


AT THE MOVIES:

Desert Hearts

It actually came after John Sayles’ sexy but melancholy Lianna, but lesbians still remember this 1985 film as the first mainstream lesbian movie. Directed by openly gay Donna Dietch — director of the early feminist documentary Woman to Woman — and based on the 1964 Jane Rule novel The Desert of the Heart, the movie follows a divorcee discovering her sexuality in the Nevada outback. Helen Shaver and Patricia Charbonneau had one of the first non-porn girl-girl sex scenes on-screen. So what happened to these players?

Now 57, director Donna Deitch has never lost her commitment to controversial, feminist-friendly fare. After directing Desert Hearts (she actually showed up in the film as a Hungarian gambler), Dietch went on to direct The Women of Brewster Place and Prison Stories: Women on the Inside, as well as episodes of NYPD Blue, ER and Murder One. In 2000, she directed the gay drama Common Ground. Now she’s behind one of the hottest shows on TV, NBC’s Crossing Jordan — starring, coincidentally, Jill Hennessy (who played gay in the South Asian lesbian flick Chutney Popcorn).

Actress Audra Lindly kept acting until her 1997 death (in her last film, she was opposite Jean Claude Van Damme in Sudden Death). And the woman who played the butchy, tarty sexpot, now 43-year-old thespian Patricia Charbonneau, continued her journey on the silver screen (she was Freddie Prinze Jr.’s mom in She’s All That) and the little screen (she’s shown up on Law and Order: Criminal Intent). But it’s actress Helen Shaver — the woman with the questions in Hearts — who’s kept queer issues in the limelight. Now 50, Shaver was acting long before Desert Hearts (remember Amityville Horror?) and cult fans love her for her role in Tremors 2: Aftershocks. But we’ve relished her turns in the gay drama Common Ground, and this year she plays the male-to-female transgendered Erica on CBS’ Education of Max Bickford. (And she’s behind the camera too, directing episodes of Soul Food and Judging Amy.)

Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love

It’s only been seven years, but fans are still asking about the cute baby dykes from Maria Magentti’s True Adventures. Good news: Both are still acting. Nicole Ari Parker (the affluent femme) recently played Mrs. to Denzel Washington in Remember the Titans, while the butchy Laurel Holloman played Justine Cooper on TV’s hot vampire show Angel.

Claire of the Moon

Since its release a decade ago, Claire of the Moon has spawned a mini-industry in its own right — with a book, a CD, a movie about making the movie and a plethora of goods. Now Claire is being re-released by Wolfe Video in a special 10th-anniversary DVD.

But what of its cast and crew? Actress Karen Trumbo has turned up in a couple of movies, including the thriller Final Justice, and has spent a great deal of time on the stage in Oregon (in crowd-pleasers like Six Degrees of Separation). But North Westerners might recognize Trumbo more for one of her smaller TV roles — hosting the Oregon Lottery. Actress Trisha Todd played the sexually questioning blonde, but off-screen she was no stranger to lesbian life. In fact, Todd had an affair with director Nicole Conn during the movie’s filming. In 1999, Todd wrote The Drive, a tell-all book that mixed fiction and memoir. Since then Todd, also an Oregonian, has continued to act onstage (she’s played everyone from Shelby in Steel Magnolias to Stella in Streetcar Named Desire). Though she still acts, directs and writes, her main love is teaching high school. Oh, and there’s another love, too. “I am in an amazing relationship with a woman who is simply the best person I have ever met,” Todd gushes. “Life is great!”

Conn, too, has moved on. She later wrote Cynara: Poetry in Motion (the book and movie) as well as Passions Shadow, Angel Wings, The Wedding Dress, and her latest novel from Naiad Press — She Walks in Beauty. As Wolfe and Naiad both plan new promotions for Claire, Conn is working on a short film, Old Lady and the Shoe. The movie stars her daughter Gabrielle (whom she parents, in Los Angeles, with her partner, activist Gwendolyn Baba).

Go Fish

When Guinevere Turner and Rose Troche met at a Chicago ACT UP meeting in the early 1990s, who knew they’d usher in the belated advent of lesbian cinema? Their Go Fish, a Christine Vachon-backed film, was quickly compared to Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It. Troche was then teaching Latino high-school students; Turner, a former member of the Lyman family cult, was a recent graduate.

“I saw her at a bar,” says Troche of Migdalia Melendez, who plays the closeted Evy in the movie. “I was looking for a Puerto Rican character, and it’s kind of funny — what do you make a Puerto Rican lesbian look like? I was originally going to play the character myself, but I’m a little too whitewashed for my own good — but when I saw Migdalia, I could see that we had a certain amount in common.” Melendez agreed to the role, on one condition: She had to bring the child she baby-sat with her.

Anastasia Sharp, who plays horny butch Daria, was a server at a restaurant the filmmakers frequented, Leo’s Lunchroom. Added to the mix were T. Wendy McMillan (as a prof) and V.S. Brodie (as the tea-drinking dyke).

So what happened to these feisty broads? Many left Chicago for New York. McMillan and Melendez are hard to find, though the latter may be the same Migdalia Melendez who works as an administrator for the anti-tobacco organization Match Coalition (we could never get her on the phone to confirm). V.S. Brodie has continued in the film industry, and though she showed up as a karaoke singer in Cheryl Dunye’s Watermelon Woman, it looks like she’s behind the scenes now. She worked as a production manager on Dead Funny and later as a production assistant on Julianne Moore’s Safe. Anastasia Sharp is still turning heads. She showed up in Caspar Stracke’s 1999 avant-garde film Circle’s Short Circuit (an experimental feature-length film with no beginning or end).

Turner and Troche have both been even more visible. Turner, who wrote, produced and starred in Go Fish, later showed up in more gay films, including Watermelon Woman and Kiss Me Guido. She adapted the book American Psycho for the screen and turned up as one of Christian Bale’s hapless victims in the film. Once romantically linked to Portia di Rossi, Turner is generally tight-lipped about her liaisons. Though she’s turned up in a couple of Kevin Smith movies — Dogma and Chasing Amy — the 34-year-old Turner disputes rumors that the latter film is about Smith’s crush on her. Her latest roles? She stars alongside Deborah Harry in the gay comedy The Fluffer, as a despondent wife in the Southern gothic tale Stray Dogs and as the voice of a Barbie doll in her ex-girlfriend Troche’s latest film, Safety of Objects. Turner recently directed as well — an indie called Spare Me — and is working on an adaptation of the book Pinball.

After the success of Go Fish, Troche adapted the novel Low Life in High Heels for the screen and wrote HBO’s Once I Had a Secret Love — a tale of inter-housewife romance in the 1950s. She followed those with the British sex comedy Bedrooms and Hallways. When she began teaching film studies at the New School in Manhattan — she also guest-lectures at NYU and Columbia University — she began work on her latest film, the very moody The Safety of Objects. In it, Glenn Close is the formidable mother of a comatose son (played by Dawson’s Creek’s Joshua Jackson).

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