“It can be hard - I want to gossip and share my interpretation of something, but I can’t. “I found that I was as excited as they are,” she admits. The #Gaytham community has helped Cartagena discover her own fandom for the show, she says. “I care about their opinions, they suggest things I haven’t thought about, and provoke me to look deeper into the character. I just so happen to play Renee,” she says. “I’m a part of it because they allow me to be part of it, part of their community. While many of Gotham’s cast interact with fans through social media, Cartagena’s bond with the #Gaytham community is especially strong. “They’re so supportive, they get me excited about everything in the show.” The community that has organized around the #Gaytham hashtag on Twitter and Tumblr is something close to Cartagena’s heart. #VICTORIA CARTAGENA TV#(Hogan, now senior editor at, told THR that the #Gaytham hashtag was “one of a million hashtags that spawned out of a desire for gay women to be able to watch TV and talk about it with other gay women.” The remarkably catchy pun, she says, is the result of “needing the hashtag to be close enough to the show so people could contextualize the tweets, but arcane enough that we could find each other!”) “The Friday before the first episode aired, I did an interview with Heather Hogan at AfterEllen,” Cartagena remembers, “and at the end of the interview, she said, ‘We’re going to be live tweeting under the hashtag #Gaytham, if you want to find your gay fans, here they are.’ ” The fandom, however, was well aware of what was in store. “At the first cast dinner, Erin Richards came up to me and said, ‘Are you playing Renee? Hello lover!’ I didn’t know until I got the first script and then I realized.” “I didn’t know anything!” she insists, explaining that she auditioned using fake sides and a fake character, not knowing that she was up for the role of Montoya. It’s Montoya’s status as an out lesbian that has secured much of the character’s fanbase online, but Cartagena admits that she had no idea about the character’s sexuality when she got the role. My goal now is to read everything Montoya has appeared in. “I has decided that I wasn’t going to read any of the comics, and that I was going to base my performance on what the script told me about her because it was so descriptive and right on, but when I Googled her and saw she was so important, I thought, ‘I want to find out more about her.’ Gotham Central made me a comic book fan. “When I was reading Gotham Central, I was like, ‘Oh my God - a Latina, lesbian bad-ass vigilante? Yes, please!’ ” she recalls. #VICTORIA CARTAGENA SERIES#( 52, which continued her story, saw Rucka bring her out of her alcoholism and into life as a costumed vigilante herself.) It was also the series that convinced Cartagena of Montoya’s strength. Gotham Central, which ran from 2002 through 2006, promoted Montoya to a lead character and, in a number of critically acclaimed and award-winning storylines, dealt with her being outed against her will and coming to terms - or, really, failing to come to terms - with being an out lesbian on the police force. Initially portrayed as an upright, if somewhat intense, cop, Montoya came into her own under the pen of writer Greg Rucka in a number of stories running in the Gotham Central and 52 series. The character was actually originally created for the 1990s Batman: The Animated Series television series, although DC made a point of introducing her in 1992’s Detective Comics No. For those who aren’t familiar with Montoya beyond her Gotham appearances, such excitement might surprise.
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