Kate Clinton

In addition to being the host for IN THE LIFE's first episode, Kate Clinton is a faith-based, tax-paying, America-loving political humorist and family entertainer. With a career spanning over 25 years, Kate Clinton has worked through economic booms and busts, Disneyfication and Walmartization, gay movements and gay markets, lesbian chic and queer eyes, and ten presidential inaugurals. She still believes that humor gets us through peacetime, wartime and scoundrel time.

In 2006, Kate Clinton celebrated her 25th Anniversary of performing with a 50-city IT'S COME TO THIS! tour. The National Center of Lesbian Rights came aboard as the tour's major sponsor along with supporting sponsors, PlanetOut Inc, Air America Radio and The Advocate. This year she brings her new show, CLIMATE CHANGE around the world.

At the 2007 GLAAD Media Awards, Kate Clinton was presented with the Pioneer Award.

"Kate Clinton has held the mirror that reflects every single issue that has faced us for the last 25 years. We've laughed with her, we've cried with her, and we've been changed by her," said Kate Kendell, Executive Director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

Kate has performed nationally since 1981 from Joe's Pub in New York City to the Park West in Chicago to the Herbst Theater in San Francisco, and back to New York for several off-Broadway runs, with hundreds of comedy club dates in between. She has been featured at comedy festivals including Just for Laughs in Montreal, the Toyota Comedy Festival in New York, and Marshall's Women in Comedy Festival. She has come a long way from those first performances in Unitarian Church basements. She still prays to the Unit.

Her two decades plus of material are on record in her seven comedy collections, including Comedy You Can Dance To, Read These Lips and The Marrying Kind. Her first volume of work, Don't Get Me Started, was published by Ballantine in 1998. The audio companion was named one of 1998's Best Audiobooks by Publishers Weekly.

Her second book, What The L? is a laugh-out-loud collection of dangerous humor from one of the all-time-favorite lesbian comics living under one of the all-time-worst presidents. In 2005 it was nominated in the humor category for the prestigious 2005 Lambda Literary Award, considered to be the highest accolade for a book from the LGBT community.

Kate writes monthly columns for The Progressive and The Advocate in which she waxes comical and philosophical about the state of our nation and those who have put us in such a state. She has written for The New York Times and George magazine among others. Kate served as a writer on The Rosie O'Donnell Show during its rollout period in 1996.

A respected and sought-after member of the Commentariat, she has appeared on Good Morning America, Nightline, Entertainment Tonight, The Rosie O'Donnell Show, The L Word and numerous news and talk shows on Comedy Central, Lifetime, LOGO, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNN, and C-Span. She hosted IN THE LIFE, and The World According To Us. Her one woman show, Talking A Blue Streak , was broadcast on hereTV! in 2006. This year here! Comedy Presents released a DVD of this show.

Kate's opening ceremony performance in Chicago at Gay Games VII was released on the official Gay Games DVD in 2006.

In addition to live performance, Kate appeared in the film The Secret Lives of Dentists directed by Alan Rudolph and is one of four lesbian comics featured in Laughing Matters , an award-winning documentary produced by Andrea Meyerson. She is the narrator's voice in Joan Biren's documentary No Secrets Anymore - the Times of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyons and has a cameo appearance in Dee Mosbacher's documentary Radical Harmonies. Also narrated by Kate Clinton, Mom's Apple Pie: The Heart of the Lesbian Mothers' Custody Movement (October 2006) revisits the early tumultuous years of the lesbian custody movement through the stories of five lesbian mothers and their four children.

As an actress, humorist, panelist and host, Kate has worked with some of the great writers and performers of our time. Kate participated in a staged reading of Tony Kushner's play, SLAVS , with Olympia Dukakis, Tracey Ullman and Madeline Kahn at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York. Kate was a panelist in a public discussion Satire in America and hosted an evening at The Kennedy Center when Richard Pryor received the first-ever Mark Twain Award. At New York's 92nd St. Y she interviewed Calvin Trillin and Harry Shearer and took part in Leonard Lopate's Politics is Funny Business.

Kate emceed the AMFAR Seasons of Hope event where Clive Davis, Michael Douglas and Billy Crystal presented awards to Quincy Jones, Sharon Stone and Robin Williams. At Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, she joined Dick Cavett, and Moderator Ted Koppel for the Alfred I. DuPont Forum Money, Humor & Spin in Election 2000 broadcast on PBS. She performed at the 2001 V-Day celebration of The Vagina Monologues in a sold-out Madison Square Garden benefit to end violence against women. Also in 2001 Kate replaced Dick Cavett on Broadway as the Narrator of The Rocky Horror Show. In 2002 she appeared for six weeks in the New York production of The Vagina Monologues. Each year Kate performs at Nothin' Like a Dame, an annual star-studded gala performance and event featuring women from stage, film, and the performing arts. Proceeds from this one night only event benefit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and are earmarked to support the Phyllis Newman Women's Health Initiative of the Actors' Fund of America.

Kate has been a volunteer emcee for hundreds of fundraising dinners and events which have raised millions of dollars for The National Center for Lesbian Rights, the Ms. Foundation, the New York City LGBT Community Center, the Gill Foundation, the Gina Gibney Dance Company to name a few. In 1999 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Previous recipients included Coretta Scott King, Edward Kennedy and Jocelyn Elders. She was listed in the New York Magazine's Year 2001 Gay Power 101. In May 2005, The Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund honored Kate Clinton with the highest of Lambda Legal awards.

Kate has taught humor writing at the prestigious Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA where poet laureate Robert Pinsky and Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Cunningham have also taught. She lectures widely on humor and the uses of humor in cultural change.