ACTRESS
CANDIS CAYNE
She's come a long way, baby. Having first made her mark in the New York club scene of the early '90s, former drag queen and now proud trans woman Candis Cayne has done nothing but prove her versatility and staying power in the years since. Cayne's choreography was a highlight of the early mainstream dragfest To Wong Foo…, and this year she reprised her landmark role as Carmelita, the transsexual love interest of William Baldwin's character in the series Dirty Sexy Money, and played a therapist on an episode of the cult seriesSordid Lives.
DIRECTOR
GREGG ARAKI
The award-winning director of a number of early-'90s New Queer Cinema films, including The Living End and Totally F***d Up, as well as 2004's dark drama Mysterious Skin, Gregg Araki scored with lighter fare in 2008, releasing his smart but overlooked stoner comedy, Smiley Face. The soon-to-be cult classic ushered Anna Faris out of her Scary Movie groove, as she very convincingly played an aspiring actress-slacker who devours 14 of her roomie's hash cupcakes and ends up on the run with the original Communist Manifesto.COMMUNITY ACTIVIST
JOËL TAN
What does it take to be the director of community engagement at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts? It helps to be a poet, a fiction writer, a playwright, and an AIDS activist. The Manila-born Tan has also edited three collections of erotica and is currently working on an opera, Marcelina.DIRECTOR
KIMBERLY PEIRCE
The Boys Don't Cry director turned her lens to the fighting in Iraq in this year's Stop-Loss, a film inspired by the true stories of American soldiers, including her own brother. The movie, which starred Ryan Phillippe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Channing Tatum, premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival.WRITERS & ACTORS
JASON DOTTLEY & DEL SHORES
In addition to writing and producing for the fourth and fifth seasons of the U.S. version of Queer as Folk, Del Shores (right, with banjo) is the award-winning brains behind the theatrical and cinematic gay cult sensation Sordid Lives, which became a television show on Logo this summer. Sordid Lives: The Series features Rue McClanahan, Olivia Newton-John, Leslie Jordan, and Shores's husband of five years, Jason Dottley (on piano), who stars as Ty, a struggling actor who decides to come out to his conservative Texas family. The couple is currently working with Funny Boy Films to release a film adaptation of Shores's play Southern Baptist Sissies in 2009.ACTOR
GUILLERMO DÍAZ
One of Guillermo Díaz's first film roles was as a drag queen named La Miranda in the 1995 film Stonewall. Since then, the 37-year-old actor, who has been out throughout his career, has turned in his heels to play gang members, stoners, and most recently, the snarky, thick-skinned drug trafficker Guillermo García Gómez on Weeds. Next year Díaz will appear in the horror-comedy short Evilution and the Brittany Murphy thriller Across the Hall.