The outspoken comic and LGBT champion guest stars on tonight’s episode of the hit NBC drama and amid lesbian kiss controversy.
Fans of Law & Order: SVU have long suspected (and hoped) Detective Benson, Mariska Hargitay’s character, was one of us—especially in the early seasons when she had that lesbi-tastic haircut.
Tonight, we may finally get our questions answered. Rumor mills have it that tonight’s episode was slated to feature a lesbian kiss. If that wasn't enough to get fan-girl blook pumping,TV Guide has confirmed that it will feature none other then lesbian adjacent D-lister Kathy Griffin.
Griffin's long-anticipated guest appearance airs tonight. According to Griffin, in a series of sneak-peak Youtube interviews, the episode was written with her in mind and took its cues from her stand-up routine. In the episode, she plays a lesbian activist at the forefront of a group protesting a rise in crimes against the lesbian community. She wouldn’t say if her character turns out to be the hero or the villain, but revealed that somewhere in the “twists and turns of the show” she kisses both Hargitay’s character, and Malone’s. Swoon.
Griffin says that although she was daunted by this fling into the world of serious acting, rehearsals, lines, and writers, her appearance on the show has been “a humbling experience, and definitely, by far the biggest challenge of my acting career,” and she has repeatedly referred to it as an A-List moment on her D-list life.
However, before you get too excited, according to Kathy Griffin’s Twitter account a whole new wave of Internet rumors are swirling about the episode. Seems there’s a chance that the kiss may have been from the tonight's episode—not because of the graphic nature of a lesbian kiss, but because of a backlash over Detective Benson’s homophobic reaction to it.
Leaked clips of the scene are pretty chopped up and isolated, so it's early yet to take a stance on the issue—but from what is available now it appears that Benson warns her fellow officer not to go into the room for fear of dangerous lesbian kisses.
It remains to be seen if the the point of the episode is breaking down these homophobias. Or if Benson is actually a jerk. I suppose we’ll just have to wait and find out together.
As if you needed another reason to tune in, eh?
The clip in question can be found here: