In accepting the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Individual Episode, Lena Waithe asked the LGBTQIA+ community to come together.
“A lot of people ask me why I say I’m queer,” she said after accepting her award from Halle Berry. Waithe won for her work on the “Thanksgiving” episode in the second season of “Master of None,” which chronicles her own coming out story — for which she also won an Emmy last year.
“I say that because I think it’s a big umbrella. I don’t want to separate myself from my trans family, my non-binary, bisexual [family],” she said. “I feel like sometimes we can be a little segregated, you know what I mean?”
“We need to be united, because Laverne Cox’s struggle may look different than mine, but the pain we feel is the same,” she said. “Someone who may be A-sexual may have a different journey than mine, but we have a similar life.”
“There’s things we have in common,” she continued. “And at the end of the day, we’re already ‘othered,’ so why should we ‘other’ ourselves anymore than we already are?”
“We have to educate each other on our own individual journeys, because at the end of the day, we’re all we’ve got,” she continued. “So let’s hold on to that and let’s hold on to each other. We’ve got to be one big family.”
“When we stand together, there’s no weapon they can form that can harm us.”