Comedy icon Lily Tomlin is out, proud and on her way to Sydney. She spoke with Katrina Fox.

There was no big ‘coming out’ for Lily Tomlin. Unlike Ellen Degeneres, who used the cover of Time magazine in 1997 to proclaim ‘I’m Gay’, Tomlin has managed to pull off the feat of maintaining a relative privacy about her 35-year relationship with her partner and creative collaborator, Jane Wagner.

“[In the 1970s] most writers were very well aware of my relationship with Jane but wouldn’t write about it, no matter how much I talked about Jane or made reference to her,” she explains during a telephone interview from a hotel room in North Carolina on the eve of her first ever trip to Australia (quarantine laws prevented her from travelling here in the past with her dog who has since died).

In fact, Tomlin turned down the cover of Time magazine in 1975 when it was offered to her in return for coming out. “As an artist I felt it was unacceptable to offer me a magazine cover for trading my personal life,” she says. That said, she is “totally grateful” to Ellen and Rosie O’Donnell for their subsequent public self-outings, due to their being of a “different time and circumstances”.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Tomlin made her television debut in 1966 before rising to national prominence three years later on the hit show, Laugh In, with her characterisations of Ernestine, the telephone operator, and Edith Ann, a mischievous six-year-old.

Since then, she has carved out an impressive career as a comedian and actress, winning numerous awards, including six Emmys and two Tonys. Her 1977 Broadway debut, Appearing Nitely, later released as an HBO Special, introduced audiences to more oddball characters, including Trudy the bag lady; Crystal the hang-gliding quadriplegic and Sister Boogie Woman, a 77-year-old Blues revivalist.

Her film and TV highlights include 1980’s comedy 9 to 5; the film adaptation of Wagner’s play The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe in 1991; The Beverley Hillbillies (1993); and I Heart Huckabees (2004), as well as recent guest appearances in Will & Grace and a regular stint on US presidential drama The West Wing.

If she’s experienced any discrimination on account of her being a lesbian, it doesn’t seem to have affected her career, but she acknowledges it may have happened without her knowledge. “Maybe covertly,” she ponders. “I really don’t know. I have a certain kind of privilege in that I’ve been around for so long and people have always treated me with a certain kind of affection. [But] I’m sure there are people as they become conscious of the fact I’m gay may back away from me or even be dismayed and negative.”

Not only did Tomlin not have a big public coming out, there was no personal drama either, no ‘oh my god, I think I’m a lesbian’ moment. “No, I think I was always precocious sexually in some way,” she says. “I swung through all kinds of permeations. Even as a child I was fascinated with the human body and sexuality. If we’d go visit a neighbour I’d look on their bookshelves right away to see if there were any marriage manuals because they would describe sex acts.”

But that’s all the marriage manuals were good for, because while Tomlin, a proud feminist, supports GLBTI activists’ push for gay marriage for those who want it, she and Wagner are not interested in tying the knot. “I personally don’t care about same-sex marriage. I’m glad if people want to get married, but I don’t want to get married,” she says. “If I were straight I don’t think I’d want to get married – the wardrobe alone is enough to boggle your mind.

“There’s many things Jane and I aren’t able to do, but probably as independent women we’ve lived with that for a long time and come to terms with it. I understand if you make same-sex marriage equal to heterosexual marriage in church, that’s a pretty profound accomplishment to the culture, but it doesn’t mean that much to me; it’s imitation. I don’t want to imitate straight people, and certain institutions have been so corrupt and destructive, who wants to imitate them?”

Ironically though, after 35 years, Tomlin and Wagner’s relationship has lasted longer than many of their heterosexual counterparts. So how do the two of them, now in their sixties, keep things interesting? “Oh God, I don’t know – probably costumes,” Tomlin laughs. “I think it’s just a determination, it’s a mindset. You make it work – it’s not worth sacrificing just because of the fickleness of humanity.”

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