High Art actress and mom of a lesbian daughter Ally Sheedy has become an enthusiastic LGBT activist over the past few years. In a recent interview with AfterEllen Sheedy talked about how her 17-year-old daughter Rebecca helped spur that passion along with a friend who got her involved with the Ali Forney Center in New York.
Sheedy tells AfterEllen that she has a close friend on the board of the Ali Forney Center, an organization that provides housing for homeless LGBT youth, and decided to take a tour one day. She says she realized how important the beds provided by the organization for homeless youth are and started lending her voice to the cause. “In the freezing winter, the kids will have a warm place for the day but at night, they're on the street. And having a teenager and seeing the teenagers — it really hit me," Sheedy says.
Aside from having a lesbian daughter, Sheedy also says she realizes that her role as Lucy Berliner in Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art made her something of a lesbian icon.
"Women in general come up to me about that movie. It's a mixture - a huge percentage of gay women really identified with Lucy or fell in love with Lucy," Sheedy said. "It's funny, there are a lot of women in general who, for some reason, got hooked by that movie. I'm not quite sure if it's only - I kind of think it definitely speaks to gay women but also speaks to, for some reason, women, more than men.”
Having taken a break from acting over the past couple years to be a full-time mom, now that Rebecca will be graduating high school and heading off to college, Sheedy says she hopes to get back to work, specifically on TV.
"I've been looking for a television series because there's some good stuff in there. And I found one and I did the pilot and it actually shoots in New York so if that goes that'll be my next big thing to work on," she said.
The pilot is for a show in development for Lifetime based on the Modern Love column in the Sunday New York Times. What makes the role especially exciting is that Sheedy plays a lesbian.
"I play a glamorous, funny editor at the New York Times. So she's the editor, one of the editors, and is divorced or not any longer with her ex and marries another woman and has a child. The series is about what relationships are... and all the unconventional, strange things relationships are today,” Sheedy explains. “I just hope it goes because I love it.”
Read all about Sheedy’s work with the Ali Forney Center, her thoughts on High Art and more on AfterEllen.
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