TS REV AR IE W LGBT S ATLA NTA E N TE T RT AINME N

A&E

Breaking ground as the first openly gay comic to perform on American television, in 1993 on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” Lea DeLaria is still carrying the torch on TV two decades later, representing a deeply unsung subset in the queer community: the butch lesbian on the Netflix hit “Orange Is The New Black.”

The 58-year-old opens up about the “lesser known” controversy surrounding her historical TV debut—why she’s turned down so many gay roles since then—and why she thinks we should drop the community’s longtime collective acronym, LGBT.