THE REBEL GIRLS
ISIS KING, LIZ BRIXIUS, LINDA WALLEM,
SARAH SCHULMAN & HELEN MOLESWORTH
She didn’t quite make it to the halfway point of the 11th cycle of America’s Next Top Model last fall, but as the first transgender contestant on Tyra Banks’s model-making machine, King (far left), now 24, became one of the most visible trans people on television in the past year: She went on to share her journey through gender reassignment surgery—and even accept a marriage proposal—on The Tyra Banks Show.
Cabaret host turned 20-year television vet Wallem (second from left) (Cybill, That ’70s Show) and former poetry professor Brixius (center) teamed up to create Showtime’s Nurse Jackie, which they describe as “a very savvy TV show with a very poetic heart.” Not bad words to describe their lead actress, Edie Falco, either. The duo share producing and show-running duties, weaving gay and lesbian storylines into the series effortlessly, without the stunt-gaying that plagues network dramas.
Schulman (second from right) had an exceptional year. The writer-historian published both her novel The Mere Future and the nonfiction book Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences and won the 2009 Kessler Award for her contribution to GLBTQ studies. She also co-coordinated The ACT UP Oral History Project, a collection of video interviews with surviving members, which premiered this fall in the exhibition “ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993.”
Molesworth (right) has been the chief curator of contemporary art at the Harvard University Art Museums since 2007. This October, she co-curated “ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993,” the retrospective of more than 70 politically charged posters and other visual media from the watershed period in the gay rights movement, which included Schulman’s exhibitions.
