Student Blog: Pride Prevails

Broadway owes much of its soul to queer people. They have created, costumed, composed, choreographed, and carried this stage long before there was space to be openly celebrated. And still, even now, queerness is often invited to perform but not to lead.

Broadway has always depended on the creativity, labor, and brilliance of LGBTQ+ artists. Queer performers, writers, directors, designers, and visionaries have built its foundation. That is not up for debate. What has changed over time is how publicly their contributions are acknowledged. And even in 2025, that recognition still feels conditional. That presence, the unapologetic queerness embedded in the bones of theater, matters more than ever. Not just because of the growing political attacks on queer and trans lives across the country. But because Broadway is often praised as a progressive space when in reality it still struggles to support the very voices it claims to celebrate.

Pride on Broadway should not mean rainbow lights and themed playlists for the month of June. It should mean consistent investment in queer stories, queer talent, and queer leadership. It should mean producing work that challenges, not just entertains. It should mean putting resources behind bold voices, not just familiar ones. Still, in 2025, that presence matters. And it does not always take the shape audiences might expect. It does not always look like a love story or a clean-cut moral. Sometimes it looks like humor that catches you off guard. Sometimes it is quiet grief. Sometimes it is rage. Sometimes it is joy that does not come with a backstory or a need to be explained. Sometimes queerness exists in a character who does not come out because they were never written to be a lesson. But that presence loses power if safety only exists in certain cities. If only certain kinds of queer stories get produced while others are called too specific or too risky. If queer characters are still being written by people who do not understand or live the experience. As someone who is a small part of the queer community, I carry my own perspective and experience, but I know I will never fully understand every facet of someone else’s journey. That requires humility and compassion. The queer community is vast, and each story deserves its own space without judgment or assumptions.

Theater does not just reflect culture. It has the power to interrupt it. And it should. It should say out loud what others try to erase. It should refuse invisibility. And it should do that not with apology but with work that is honest, nuanced, messy, joyful, painful, unfiltered, and fully human. That means giving queer playwrights the room to create without reshaping themselves to fit a mold. It means casting trans and nonbinary actors as complete people, not background symbols. It means greenlighting stories that do not fit an easy marketing pitch. And it means handing real creative control to queer artists, not just putting them onstage but letting them shape the work itself.

Broadway loves to call itself inclusive. But we are still seeing the same narratives approved over and over. Queer characters written by people who are not queer. Stories that flatten queerness so it is easier to applaud. That is not progress. That is packaging. Theater was never meant to be safe. It was meant to reveal. And Pride was never about seeking approval. It was about refusing to settle.