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History was made as Alex Newell and J. Harrison Ghee became the first non-binary actors to win honors at the Tony Awards.
Both Newell and Ghee had already made their mark as the first openly nonbinary performers to be nominated for awards this year. Newell was first up as they won Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical for their role as Lulu in Shucked, the comedy set in the fictional Midwestern community of Cobb County.
“I’m not gonna hold y’all, ‘cause it’s hot in here,” they began. “Thank you for seeing me, Broadway. I should not be up here, as a queer, nonbinary, fat, Black little baby from Massachusetts.” Newell thanked their mother before concluding: “And to anyone that thinks they can’t do it, I’m going to look you dead in your face. That you can do anything you put your mind to.”
Shortly after, Ghee won the Tony for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical for their role as Jerry in Some Like It Hot, based on the 1959 Billy Wilder movie starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. “For every trans, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming human who ever was told you couldn’t be, you couldn’t be seen, this is for you,” Ghee said while accepting the award.
Newell, who previously starred on the musical sitcom Glee, explained their willingness to the New York Times to be in the gendered category: “I look at the word ‘actor’ as one, my vocation, and two, genderless. We don’t say plumbess for plumber. We don’t say janitoress for janitor. We say plumber, we say janitor. That’s how I look at the word, and that’s how I chose my category.”
In the same interview, Ghee said: “Wherever I am, I will show up as who I am. Someone’s compartmentalization of me doesn’t limit me in any way.” The Broadway veteran who has also starred in Kinky Boots and Mrs. Doubtfire added, “I hope for the industry we can remove the gender of it.”
The wins for Newell and Ghee come as the country is entangled by states enacting policies that are harmful to the LGBTQ community. They also mark the first wins as openly nonbinary performers – Sara Ramirez, who won in 2005 for Spamalot, and Karen Olivo, who won in 2009 in a revival of West Side Story, would later come out as nonbinary afterward.
