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on the airoff the press

Pulitzer prizes go to author, playwright, and editor

by John Graves

Gay author Michael Cunningham and out lesbian kindergarten teacher and playwright Margaret Edson were both awarded Pulitzer Prizes for writing this year.

Cunningham became the first openly gay man to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Hours while Edson won the drama award for her play Wit, which is now playing at the off-Broadway Union Squeare Theater in New York.

Cunningham's book is a fictionalized account that interweaves the lives of Virgina Woolf in the 1920s and a lesbian editor in modern-day New York who wants to throw a final party for her gay friend, a poet living with AIDS.

Cunningham, also the winner of the American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Book Award, the PEN/ Faulkner Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award for Gay Fiction, thanked the two people who inspired him: his editor and Ken Corbett, "the love of my life" upon receiving news of the Pulitzer Prize award.

Edson's play also won the Outer Critics Circle award for best off-Broadway play. The play, which tells the story of a literature professor living with cancer, is based on Edson's observations during her work in an AIDS ward in a Washington D.C. hospital.

Edson, who lives in Atlanta with her partner Linda Merril and teaches at Atlanta's Centennial Place Elementary School, was the subject of a feature article in April 5 issue of People magazine.

Jonathan Capehart co-won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing as the only openly

gay member of the New York Daily News's editorial board. Capehart's paper won for a series of editorials on Harlem's Apollo The-

The Love Letter, is due to open in theaters May 21.

ater which led to the state of New York taking 'Banished' to a girls' school

a major hand in the historic theater's restoration.

Manheim comes out

Actress Camryn Manheim comes out as a bisexual, or as she calls it a "failed lesbian," in a cover feature interview in the April issue of Girlfriends magazine and in her recently published biography, Wake Up! I'm Fat.

In the interview Manheim talks about her liberal activism, her nine-month relationship with another woman and her final realization that she is attracted to both men and women. See Manheim in her Emmy-winning role as Ellenor Frutt, an outspoken attorney on ABC's courtroom series The Practice Sundays at 10 pm.

Ellen and Anne buy rings

USA Today's Jeannie Williams reports that Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche had a very special surprise for Ellen's mother Betty DeGeneres at a recent book party at Hollywood's Book Soup for her mother's new biography, Love, Ellen, A Mother/ Daughter Journal.

It seems that Ellen told her mother that she and Anne had just bought wedding rings that day, gold bands that both have WIFE inscribed on the inside. The two women proudly showed the rings to the guests at the book party. According to Williams, Ellen and Anne did not say whether or not they planned a wedding or committment ceremony in the near future. Ellen DeGeneres' latest film,

Actress Jessica Campbell causes a stir in the just-released comedy Election when her character Tammy, a high school lesbian, decides to run for student council president against her jock brother (Chris Klein) and the film's main character, Tracy Flick, played by Reese Witherspoon.

The resulting uproar winds up with Tammy being banished, with a gleam in her eye, to an all-girl academy.

Nine films for summer

Besides Election and The Love Letter, Entertainment Weekly's April 30 “Summer Movie Preview" lists some other films to watch for.

In June, look for gay actor Rupert Everett in Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband as well as Finding North, another film about a straight woman falling for a gay guy, and Remember The Cosmos Flower, about the struggles of a young woman living with HIV in a conservative society.

In July, the movie Trick follows a night in the life of a young, gay New York theater composer, played by Neve Campbell's brother Christian Campbell, while The Velocity of Gary has Salma Hayek and Vincent D'Onofrio romantically involved with an attractive male hustler.

Trick, featuring veteran real-life drag performer Miss Coco Peru, was originally a much kinkier comedy called Gay Boy, but was toned down a bit so as not to turn off straight audiences.

In August, a teen learns to accept his transsexual father's becoming a woman in The Adventures of Sebastian Cole, a young man embarks on a night of drugs and anonymous sex with men and women in Head On and a lesbian has to "straighten up the house" when her mother and brother unexpectedly move in with her in Better Than Chocolate.

Back to high school, after prison

Amy Sedaris portrays Jerri Blank, a middle-aged, bisexual, somewhat reformed prostitute, drug user and ex-con who has returned to high school to turn her life around in Strangers with Candy, a new Comedy Central sitcom airing Wednesdays at 10:30 pm.

Comedy Central's Daily Show correspondent Stephen Colbert co-created Strangers with Sedaris and portrays a bisexual teacher on the show.

Station's power to go up

Finally, many thanks to all of you who phoned in a pledge to the WRUW Radiothon. Your pledge will help us make some big improvements around the station such as some new music, new equipment and best of all, more power, (15,000 watts, I believe) to reach more of our people.

John Graves is the producer and host of Gaywaves, a lesbian-gay public affairs show on Cleveland's WRUW 91.1 FM Fridays at 7 pm. Dave Haskell, Jim McGrattan and Kim Jones also contributed to this column.

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