LGBT Emmy winners take center stage this year
This year had a greater crop of LGBT Emmy winners, topping last year’s Emmy Awards by awarding a wider range of LGBT stories and stars.
While the 2016 Emmys honored queer-identifying women like Sarah Paulson, Kate McKinnon and Jill Soloway, there were more winners this year.
LGBT Emmy winners: Top names
Our favorite comedian, McKinnon, took home the Emmy for best supporting actress in a comedy series for Saturday Night Live for the second year in a row.
McKinnon, who attended the Emmys with her girlfriend Jackie Abbott, is best known for her impressions of Kellyanne Conway and Jeff Sessions in SNL.
During her acceptance speech, she thanked Hillary Clinton– which she also played in SNL– for her “grace and grit.”
Another winner was Lena Waithe, who took the Emmy for best writing in a comedy series for Master of None with her co-writer Aziz Ansari.
Waithe, who also stars in the show, won for writing the personal ‘Thanksgiving’ episode about her coming-out experience and this makes her the first black woman to win in this category.
“A lot of it is real,” she earlier told USA Today. “I literally came out to my mom in a diner. A lot of those lines are pulled from our actual conversation.”
Lastly, GLAAD was… um, glad that Canadian actress Tatiana Maslany wore the ampersand pin representing the organization’s pro-LGBT Together Movement at the event.
LGBT Emmy winners: Top shows
Among the shows honored were Black Mirror’s “San Junipero” episode, which got the Emmy for best television movie.
As we mentioned before, we loved this episode about Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) and Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), an interracial lesbian couple 1980s San Junipero.
Another winner was Hulu’s dystopian TV show The Handmaid’s Tale for best drama with Alexis Bledel also scoring an Emmy for her role as a lesbian in the series.
Sadly, RuPaul lost in the contest for the outstanding reality program for Drag Race against The Voice.
However, as Usama Masood, writing for MoviePilot, noted: “Let’s not forget tonight’s big winners: women. Whether it was in Outstanding Drama Series or Outstanding Limited Series, the women were the queens of the 2017 Emmys.”
“Both #TheHandmaidsTale and #BigLittleLies focused on the oppression of women in society (albeit a fictional society in the case of The Handmaid’s Tale), and their stories were ones that resounded with the critics and fans,” Masood said.