2010 Greggys: Lily Tomlin is Icon of the Year!

Watching Lily Tomlin host this year’s LA Gay and Lesbian Center gala last month, I just marveled at how funny, how smart and how edgy this brilliant performer is at the age of 71.

And, as you can see in the photo above that I took of Lily and Kathy Griffin that night, she still looks terrific!

She gives hope to all of us that the best is yet to come!

This year alone, Miss Tomlin earned an Emmy nomination for her performance as Marilyn Tobin (pictured, left) on the FX series Damages (she already has multiple Emmys, Grammy and Tonys and is an Academy Award nominee).

She and Jane Wagner – her personal and professional partner of nearly four decades – also produced Leslie Jordan’s one-man show, My Trip Down the Red Carpet, off-Broadway at the Midtown Theatre.

While Miss Tomlin has decades of fine work behind her, she continues to be in the now and she gives back to the LGBT community in very unique ways and that is why she is the Icon of the Year.

She gives her time, her name, her talent, and her love.

Last April, I was enthralled by her at the Coco Peru In Conversation with Lily Tomlin benefit held, appropriately, at the Lily Tomlin Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center.

She told Coco about how her Ernestine character came about. It was because Lily hated the telephone company and wanted to make fun of them: “Ernestine just loved herself.”

The character also had a repressed sexuality: “She was going to be a tough Bronx operator but she started squirming and snorting and it was so organically sexual.”

Several months later, on the night of the LA Center gala, Lily had some very thoughtful and funny things to say about the LGBT equality movement and coming out: “Years ago when Judy Garland died and the Stonewall Riots happened – in June of 1969 for the upstarts in the room – I was working in New York at Howard Johnsons. Honestly it’s hard to believe that even then, at that late a time, at a gathering like this, we could be surrounded by paddy wagons and we could all be arrested just for being here as gay folk. How far we have come.God love those pissed off queens from back in the day! You have to love them, you have to remember them, you cannot forget. I certainly will not.”

Other 2010 Greggy winners: Darren Criss is New Star of the Year!