Childhood:  Kate Clinton was born in Buffalo, New York. She was raised in a large Catholic family. In young adulthood she was a "pre-Michael J. Fox conservative" who attended Le Moyne College, a small Jesuit liberal arts college, and went on to teach high school English and coach.

Friends & Relationships: Clinton lives in New York City & Provincetown with her partner, Urvashi Vaid.

Work: Kate Clinton is a self-described "fumerist," or feminist humorist, who has set out to prove that being lesbian can be, and often is, funny.

Clinton has performed nationally since 1981 from Joe's Pub in New York City to the Park West in Chicago to the Herbst Theatre 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.

In addition to comedy appearances and one-woman-shows such as Correct Me If I'm Right, All Het Up and Kate's Out Is In, she has written two books, Don't Get Me Started and What the L. Her first book, 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 humour from one of the all-time-favourite lesbian comics living under one of the all-time-worst presidents. In 2005 it was nominated in the humour category for the prestigious 2005 Lambda Literary Award, considered to be the highest accolade for a book from the LGBT community.

Clinton writes monthly columns for The Progressive and frequent columns for 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 blogs for Huffington Post, Our Chart and Olivia Connect. She has written for The New York Times and George magazine among others. Clinton served as a writer on The Rosie O'Donnell Show during its rollout period in 1996.

Her two decades plus of material are on record in her eight comedy collections, including Comedy You Can Dance To, Read These Lips and The Marrying Kind.

Clinton served as grand marshal of gay pride parades. She 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.

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! and later released as a DVD.

As an actress, humorist, panellist and host, Clinton has worked with some of the great writers and performers of our time. Clinton 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. She was a panellist 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.

She has taught humour 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 humour and the uses of humour in cultural change.

Clinton 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.

Greatest Achievement: In 1999 Clinton 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 honoured Kate Clinton with the highest of Lambda Legal awards.
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.

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