Is there a queer kid who doesn’t love theater? I was thinking about this as I watched and wept my way through the fabulous three hours of this year’s Tony Awards on June 16, commenting intermittently on Twitter (X). I am such a cheerleader for the theater.
I posted a photo of myself at 15 in the arts room at Girls’ High on Twitter and wrote, “Shout out to all the queer kids like I was watching the #TonyAwards tonight.
Happy #Pride y’all. We’re here for you.”
I’ve loved theater forever. The Catholic girls school I attended for nine years, Cecilian Academy in Mount Airy, was known for its high school musicals. (St. Cecilia is the patron saint of music, musicians and composers.) I was a bit player in several of those musicals in my junior high years — “My Fair Lady,” “Finian’s Rainbow,” “Carousel” and “The King and I” — and fell in love with musicals hard and forever.
While I sang in a blues band in high school, I never really wanted to be an actor — but I did love all things theater and until I was paralyzed in 2016, went as often as possible to as many plays as possible. My wife, Maddy Gold, and I were frequent attendees at the Wilma and other local theater venues. My last stage performance was impromptu — I sang “Embraceable You” with Hershey Felder at The Prince during his one-man show “George Gershwin Alone.”
It was magical. As Maddy and I walked to a restaurant on Walnut Street for a meal after, other theatergoers walking by commented on my performance. It was all afterglow that night. Even that ephemeral moment of live theater (which sadly predated us having a cellphone memory of my performance) imprinted us—me on stage bowing to applause, my wife in the audience, caught up in the moment with me. How can you not love theater?
Maddy and I always watched the Tony Awards together, so I felt her absence deeply during the broadcast. We often talked during the Tonys about our queer adolescence together, which included going to jazz clubs out on 52nd Street and in Germantown, but also to a performance of “Hair” at the Locust Theater and a couple of Pinter plays, because we were nothing if not youthful intellectuals.
The Tonys are nearly always the best awards show of the year and they are most definitely the gayest. While the closet door inched open over decades at the Oscars, it’s always been flung wide and welcoming at the Tonys.
This year was a queer fest with some of the best-known gay actors winning awards, like Jonathan Groff and Sarah Paulson, both of whom inexplicably have never won a Tony before. There were so many memorable speeches and performances at the Tonys — Alicia Keys singing “Empire State of Mind” from “Hell’s Kitchen” got the whole audience up and singing — but it was the words of some of our best queer actors and writers that resonated most for me.
Groff is a native Pennsylvanian, raised in Lancaster. He won for Best Lead Actor in a Musical for his role as Franklin Shepard in the Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along.” Groff’s speech was one of the most memorable in a night of memorable speeches.
Groff’s speech was a paean to a gay childhood with parents who loved him as he was. He said, “Thank you for letting me dress up like Mary Poppins when I was three. Thank you for letting me act out scenes from ‘I Love Lucy’ on my 10th birthday. Thank you for always allowing my freak flag to fly without ever making me feel weird about it. Even if they didn’t always understand me, my family knew the life-saving power of fanning the flame of a young person’s passions without judgment. I walk through life with an open heart because you let me know that I could. Thank you. I love you.”
He thanked his teachers in Pennsylvania and his mentors in the theater and the cast of “Spring Awakening” who “inspired me to come out of the closet when I was 23. I’m now 39 and musical theater is still saving my soul.”
Sarah Paulson won for Best Lead Actress in a Play for her work in “Appropriate,” a play by MacArthur fellow Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Jacobs-Jenkins is also gay and writes exquisitely about race and family in ways that have previously short-listed him for the Pulitzer and won him the Tony for Best Revival of a Play.
In addition to thanking her partner of a decade, actress Holland Taylor, Paulson said theater actors “bear witness to the relentless interrogation of human experience that we endeavor to explore nightly for each other, to give back to one another with the hope of finding some shared path towards the truth about being alive. This is the heart and soul of what we do.”
Oh the power of those words. Of telling your history and how you got to that stage and what it meant to be there. This is, after all, the heart and soul of theater itself: the stories plays tell about our lives that need telling or singing and which — as Jacobs-Jenkins’ work epitomizes — reveal stories that have been hidden by history.
And history was a thread that wove through the night. Not just because of revivals or the wins of the play “Suffs” about the suffrage movement that was produced by Hillary Clinton, but how history repeats. “Cabaret at the Kit-Kat Club” was another revival and as Eddie Redmayne gave a deliciously decadent performance of “Willkommen” that epitomized the impending horror of Nazism in Weimar Germany, the echo to now was loud and long.
Billy Porter received the Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award for his work as an activist and spokesperson for the LGBTQ+ communities and he sang his opening: “I don’t feel no ways tired. Come too far from where I’ve started from. Nobody told me that the road would be easy. Oh I don’t believe. He’s brought me this far to leave me.”
Porter said, “I am grateful, I am humbled I grew up in a world where they told me that who I was was not worthy of anything. So the fact that I’m standing before you is a miracle. Toni Morrison said this is precisely the time when artists go to work. There’s no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. This is how civilizations heal. I was born in 1969. First-generation post-60s Civil Rights Movement. I came out as gay in 1985 when I was 16 years old and as we all know, and many of us in this room experienced, we went straight to the front lines to fight for our lives.”
That fight is ongoing. Which is why the Tony Awards hold such meaning for LGBTQ+ people who found refuge in school theater groups and backstage huddles and writing out their lives. The immersive quality of theater, the interaction between the actors and the audience—epitomized by the emcee in Cabaret—has always held us in its powerful and welcoming thrall. As Stephen Sondheim wrote for us decades ago in the iconic ballad “Somewhere” in “West Side Story.”
“There’s a place for us,
Somewhere a place for us.
Peace and quiet and open air
Wait for us, somewhere.
Some day,
Somewhere,
We’ll find a new way of living,
We’ll find a way of forgiving.
Somewhere.”
Theater has always been that open air where the stories of our lives are recognized and celebrated. It was a glorious night at the Tonys and like so many nights at the theater for me, one I won’t soon forget.