This Emmy cycle has set a striking new standard for inclusivity.
Broadly and deeply across the acting categories, LGBTQIA performers have been honored by the Television Academy. Past nominees like Bowen Yang (“Saturday Night Live”), Hannah Einbinder (“Hacks”) and Ayo Edebiri (“The Bear”) are joined by first-timers like Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer (“Fellow Travelers”), Andrew Scott (“Ripley”) and Lily Gladstone (“Under the Bridge”). Three stars of “Baby Reindeer” — Richard Gadd, a bisexual; Jessica Gunning, a lesbian; and Nava Mau, a trans woman — were nominated. And Gunning and Mau join Gladstone, who uses she/they pronouns, and “True Detective: Night Country” star Kali Reis, who identifies as two-spirit, in the best supporting actress in a limited series category. Reis’ co-star Jodie Foster is nominated, too, as are real-life couple Holland Taylor (“The Morning Show”) and Sarah Paulson (“Mr. and Mrs. Smith”). Variety’s Clayton Davis notes that Taylor and Paulson are the first queer couple to be nominated for acting Emmys in the same year.
The list could go on — and yet it’s less interesting, in and of itself, than the conditions that made this happen. Several of these performers are nominated not merely as out queer actors but for roles that embrace and lean into their identity, and into queer storytelling. Einbinder, for instance, is a bisexual woman playing a bisexual woman — and her “Hacks” character, Ava, spent the third season figuring out what it was she wanted in love as well as professionally. (Her liaison with a politically conservative golfer, played by Christina Hendricks, made for one of the season’s outright funniest set pieces, as Ava realizes there are some places she isn’t willing to go for lust.)
Yang’s sensibility as a gay consumer of culture colors every one of his “Weekend Update” desk bits, while both “Fellow Travelers” — explicitly about the journey of gay men through midcentury American history — and “Ripley” — obliquely addressing the complicated sexuality of a far more withdrawn midcentury American — draw friction and heat from the actors at their center. And the confessional, first-person “Baby Reindeer” is directly about Gadd’s real-life journey in discovering his feelings about his sexuality.
We’re a long way from, say, “Will & Grace” or from “Angels in America,” for which Eric McCormack and then Al Pacino and Jeffrey Wright won acting Emmys in 2001 and 2004, respectively. It takes nothing away from those memorable and terrific performances — justly Emmy-winning in their moments, and both projects very powerful in shifting culture toward widespread acceptance of queer people — to note that a show like “Baby Reindeer” or like “Hacks” gets an added dose of power from showing a perspective from someone who’s lived something like it.
Though those older shows were breakthroughs, there have been other signature moments that marked progress for the Academy — like out gay actor Billy Porter winning a trophy for “Pose” in 2019, or that show’s trans lead Michaela Jaé Rodriguez getting a nomination in 2021. This year didn’t change everything: Yang, Edebiri and Einbinder have been here before. So has Paulson, for various (at times deliriously campy) Ryan Murphy projects.
But what’s striking, this year, is how many different tones the queer nominated performers are able to strike in series across genre and TV landscape. It’s a bit funny to lump together “Baby Reindeer” and “Hacks,” which share little more than performers playing off of their real-life sexuality to tell stories: The former plays Gadd’s personal story as a painful, fraught drama, eventually shot through with redemption, while Ava’s explorations in dating start from a place of humor and find their way somewhere heartfelt. While Ripley isn’t out (or, necessarily, queer — his sexuality is tortured, to say the least), Scott finds his way inside; Bailey and Bomer build out a believable, compelling romance. All of these represent what’s possible when you let queer people tell their own stories.
Progress makes itself known another way at this year’s Emmys, too. Taylor’s real-life identity doesn’t enter her character on “The Morning Show” so much as her authoritative bearing does, her crispness of diction, her clear and delicious comfort in inhabiting her own skin. Taylor is an Emmy favorite, dating back to her 1999 win for supporting actress on “The Practice”; she was later nominated four times for her work on “Two and a Half Men.” And most of her nominations came before she came out in 2015. Taylor was a queer actor picking up Emmy nominations and a win without any viewers at home realizing.
Her presence as an out queer woman, with so many other performers like her, may inspire more and more actors in the future to live openly as themselves. As this year’s Emmy nominations prove, there will be room for them at the table.
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