So, the LGBTQ pundits and culture watchers were … wrong. Or at the very least, anticipating “history” way before its time. After frustration over “American Idol”’s inability to crown an LGBTQ winner, they held high hopes for a new competing star-making vehicle, “The Voice.”

In 2011, the Advocate burst with excitement saying “There’s no need to wait on NBC’s new vocal competition, The Voice. The show boasts four gay contestants — two men and two women — heading into the battle round, where they will be coached by the likes of Blake Shelton, Cee Lo, Christina Aguilera, and Adam Levine. And while a couple of them might be eliminated in the next few weeks (in the battle round, teams of eight are whittled down to four when teammates face each other in a sing-off), chances that there will be a lesbian or gay singer competing to become the first ‘Voice’ are strong.”

Well. Not so strong. All of the LGBTQ contenders were eliminated. As were others over the years that even included a young trans man singing with his father as one of the show’s few duet contestants. “American Idol” did end up crowning an LGBTQ winner in its 18^th season.

That was then … and this is now. After 25 seasons, “The Voice” has crowned Asher HaVon its winner. It is no wonder, as Asher’s vocal tone is hypnotic, rich, and blows through your auditory senses. Listening to him hit certain notes in his vocal runs can bring you to a flood of emotional tears. At least, it did for me.

It did for coach Reba McIntire as well. 

The significance of Asher HaVon’s win goes beyond just a queer identity. It is adorned with a depth of representation and visibility. When Asher stepped on stage, he brought culture, diversity, history, and identity. 

Like many incredible vocalists, he comes from a church foundation. Reba McEntire was a wise coach choice, relating to a broad reach of American sensibilities. She is one of the rare entertainers who is beloved by fans across the broad political spectrum. She is traditional, but an ally. 

In a bit of irony, there is a segment of his hometown that still are keeping his LGBTQ status in the closet. The Selma Times-Journal brags about his “historic win,” but when they write about it, they are referring to the fact that he is the first winner from Alabama. They do not mention his LGBTQ identity at all.

Not sure how they could miss it. Asher presents in full-beat makeup with gorgeous nails to diva quality eye makeup and lashes. His costuming was never anything less than fabulous. His song choices placed him in a pantheon of LGBTQ-worshipped goddesses that included Adele, Beyonce, Whiney Houston, Patti LaBelle, Toni Braxton, Tina Turner, and Donna Summer. He was not only courageous to take on their groundbreaking hits, but did so with the talent to impress with his own versions of them.

As Asher stands on stage, he also represents a proud black man living in the spirit of America’s civil rights movement. He truly does represent Selma, Ala., and its fight for equality significance is part of his DNA and his history. In 2015, when President Barack Obama visited the city, Asher sang for him in front of a crowd of 200,000 at the famed Selma Bridge crossing.

While the significance of that event is not lost on him, Asher calls it one that he “will never forget”, he tells the Montgomery Advertiser that “The Voice” “is different because it is the Asher HaVon that most people never got a chance to see. I am free. I am walking in the authenticity of who I am, while sharing my gift. That means so much more to me than any other experience than I’ve ever had in life.”

While Asher carried his legacy, the history he represented, and his authenticity into every performance he gave over the show’s run, it was his pure talent that put him on top.  It was so impressive that it even broke through the show’s premise of four celebrity coaches battling it out for a win. Under that guise, each of the coaches pleads with America to vote for their protégés.

Asher had most of them pleading for him instead. He initially received three “chair turns” at the outset where Chance the Rapper, Dan and Shay, and Reba were the celebrities campaigning for him to pick them. John Legend was the hold-out. Asher, ever the diva connoisseur, had already picked Reba in his mind and would have picked her no matter what anyone else had said.

Legend, later in the season, shared that he received a phone call from his dad who declared not only that he was rooting for Asher, but that Asher was “THE” voice of the season. Both Legend and Chance declared Asher to be “the best vocalist on the show” several times in their feedback statements.

While Asher’s win and authenticity should bring a source of joy to LGBTQ fans, it also is a big boost for his coach and main champion, Reba McEntire. While the show has put a full-throttle on Reba as the “queen of country” and showered her with adoration, she has had some difficulty in wowing many of the auditioning singers onto her team. Asher represents a significant win for her, as well as her being also the coach for first runner-up Josh Sanders, when she starts the next season against Gwen Stefani, Michael Bubble, and Snoop Dogg. The latter two are newcomers and Stefani boasts only one previous win years ago, but a loss in her one previous match-up against McEntire.

For the future Voice contestants, Reba has some serious creds to play. 

For the rest of us, in the LGBTQ community, in the dance clubs, and in the hearts of ones needing a new diva to love, Asher has arrived.

Related:

Asher HaVon and Coach Reba perform Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald’s ‘On My Own’ during ‘The Voice’ finale.

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Rob Watson is the host of the popular Hollywood-based radio/podcast show RATED LGBT RADIO.

He is an established LGBTQ columnist and blogger having written for many top online publications including The Los Angeles Blade, The Washington Blade, Parents Magazine, the Huffington Post, LGBTQ Nation, Gay Star News, the New Civil Rights Movement, and more.

He served as Executive Editor for The Good Man Project, has appeared on MSNBC and been quoted in Business Week and Forbes Magazine.

He is CEO of Watson Writes, a marketing communications agency, and can be reached at [email protected] 

TV veteran Steven Levitan already had a lot of success as a writer, showrunner, and producer before the premiere of “Modern Family” – a series he co-created with Christopher Lloyd – in 2009. That show turned out to be a cultural phenomenon, helping to redefine and normalize the representation of LGBTQ relationships on TV by including a gay couple within its ensemble of central characters while also becoming a long-running fan-favorite, winning scores of awards (including nine primetime Emmys) and being nominated for scores more before airing its final season in 2020. Even with a resume that includes shows like “Wings,” “Frasier,” “The Larry Sanders Show,” and “Just Shoot Me,” that’s got to be considered a career-topping triumph.

Now, Levitan is back with a new show, “Reboot,” which premiered on Hulu Sept. 20, and from its very first pre-credit sequence it signals a welcome return to the same rapid-fire comedic style that kept “Modern Family” on everybody’s weekly watchlist for 11 years – still inclusive, with prominent queer characters and storylines, but thankfully without the mockumentary format.

“Reboot” is a good-naturedly irreverent send-up of the Hollywood entertainment machine featuring “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” star Rachel Bloom as Hannah, a TV writer who gets greenlighted on her pitch for a revival of “Step Right Up,” a beloved sitcom from the early 2000s. She manages to convince the original cast to reprise their roles as the show’s “wacky family” – despite their complicated offscreen history – by promising to adapt the show for a contemporary audience, eliminating the corny, outdated humor and shifting toward a more sophisticated, realistic tone. At the first table read, however, Hannah’s plan for a reimagined series is met with a significant obstacle – the unexpected presence of the original sitcom’s creator, Gordon Gelman (Paul Reiser), who has wielded his industry clout to insert himself into the mix as a showrunner and ensure that “woke” ideas about comedy don’t get in the way of the laughs.

Obviously, this scenario provides a ripe field for jokes about the cultural conflicts that have become a fact of life in 2022 – mostly around the differing attitudes between older and younger generations, always a sure-fire bet for relatable comedy. The “OK Boomer” sparring at its core is common fodder these days, but Levitan and his creative team know comedy well enough to make it feel fresh – and their secret is to make sure that the characters are always the main attraction.

In this case, they’ve given us plenty of them to choose from. Besides Hannah and Gordon, whose rivalry for the reins quickly becomes just one of many thorns in their relationship dynamic, we also get the leading players of “Step Right Up”: Reed Sterling (Keegan-Michael Key), a Yale-trained thespian who ditched the show’s first run to pursue a movie career that never materialized; Bree Marie Johnson (Judy Greer), a once-popular star who left showbiz for a now-failed marriage to an obscure Scandinavian Duke; Clay Barber (Johnny Knoxville), a “bad boy” stand-up comic known less for his talent than for being a train wreck; and Zack Jackson (Calum Worthy), a former child star who seems to have reached his mid-20s without actually growing up. Rounding out the main ensemble is Krista Marie Yu as Elaine, a young production exec transplanted from the tech industry whose fish-out-of-water incongruity provides a necessary outsider perspective amid the show-biz histrionics that surround her.

There’s a host of supporting characters, too – a roomful of writers, for instance, hilariously bridging the generation gap with their common love of comedy even as they clash over cultural values. Drawn in broad strokes, all of them could easily be dismissed as generic tropes, stock figures updated to fit the latest cultural zeitgeist; that they come off as fully realized human beings instead of lazy stereotypes is a testament to Levitan and the real-life writers’ room responsible for bringing them to life.

It’s also a testament to the actors who play them. Key and Greer have the biggest challenge, in many ways; their characters, cut from the same egocentric cloth as so many other parodies of vain and pretentious Hollywood stars and clearly designed to be adorably insufferable, come off in early episodes as simply insufferable. As the season progresses, fortunately, their skill as performers permits them (and their characters) to rise above the flaws and foibles and win us over. The ever-reliable Knoxville does what he does best – sending up his own wild-man persona – and occasionally reminds us that he’s not a bad actor, when he gets the chance; Worthy, an ex-Disney-kid also spoofing his own real-life image, likewise injects surprising doses of winning humanity as the show goes on.

As for Bloom, essentially the main character though surrounded by an ensemble of zanies, she holds her own with all the juggernaut talent she used to make “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” a wildly popular cult hit; required to be a grounding force while dealing with her own whirlwind of personal and professional dysfunction, she succeeds more than well enough to anchor the show. Finally, Reiser brings his status as a venerable sitcom legend to give his old-school character an appropriate presence, while making him much more layered and likable than the Archie Bunker-ish throwback we expect him to be.

With such a solid cast doing the heavy lifting onscreen, “Reboot” is able to cast its satirical net wide enough to poke fun at our rapidly changing culture without losing the important human connection that keeps its never-ending bombardment of one-liners – something for which Levitan’s previous shows have been widely known and admired – from feeling hollow. That doesn’t mean the comedy ever lulls; on the contrary, even the show’s most tender and meaningful moments – which often take us by pleasant surprise – are punctuated by zingers. And while the series leans hard into the kind of uncomplicated vibe that usually marks popular mainstream sitcoms, it also lets itself play at more complex levels, getting a lot of comedic mileage out of the inescapable “meta” quality of being a show about a show – for example, the fictional series, like the real one, is produced by Hulu, just one such cheeky touch among many that make it feel more subversive and iconoclastic than perhaps it really is.

What might work even more to the benefit of “Reboot” than the considerable lineup of talent it boasts both on and behind the screen is its format – and we’re not just talking about its choice to eschew the mockumentary thing, a masterfully innovative tactic that has now become tired from overuse, even on Emmy-favored “Abbot Elementary.” In the new era of streaming content, the 23-episode season feels like an increasingly outmoded way of doing things; with only eight episodes to undertake, there’s far less chance of stretching the material (and our patience for it) thin, or of running out of ideas and undermining the show’s integrity with sub-par writing just to pad things out.

Unsaddled from that burden, “Reboot” manages to be laugh-out-loud funny throughout each episode of its first season. That alone is enough for us to look forward to season two.

Earlier this week, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences kicked off Hollywood’s second “Awards Season” of the year with the announcement of its nominations for the 74^th Annual Emmy Awards, with actors JB Smoove and Melissa Fumero doing the honors in an early morning virtual ceremony on July 12.

That means it’s time for the Blade to break down the nominees for our readers and call attention to the LGBTQ+ shows and talent that are included in the mix – and since the word count on the complete list is probably comparable to a 19^th-century Russian novel, that’s no small feat, so we’ll just say “You’re welcome” right now.

At first glance, the list might not look too queer-inclusive. Out of all the nominees for the leading actor categories, there is only one out LGBTQ+ individual – Sarah Paulson, whose performance as Linda Tripp in FX’s “Impeachment: American Crime Story” made the cut for Best Lead Actress in a Limited Series – and that was for playing a straight character.

The supporting categories look somewhat queerer, however. Nominations in the Comedy Series division include both Bowen Yang and two-time previous winner Kate McKinnon for NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” alongside previous nominee Hannah Einbinder for HBO’s “Hacks.”

In addition, Murray Bartlett scored a nod in the Limited Series Supporting Actor category for his work in HBO’s “The White Lotus,” while Nathan Lane and Jane Lynch each received nominations, as Best Guest Actor and Actress in a Comedy Series, respectively, for their turns on Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building.”

Comedian Jerrod Carmichael, who came out publicly in his 2022 HBO stand-up special “Rothaniel,” was also singled out as Best Guest Actor in a Comedy for hosting “SNL.”

For off-camera contributions, Carmichael was also nominated for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special for “Rothaniel,” and bisexual “White Lotus” creator Mike White scored a nod for both Outstanding Writing and Direction for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie.

Other shows that received nominations for queer non-acting contributions include “American Crime Story: Impeachment” (Sarah Burgess, Writing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Drama Special), “Only Murders in the Building” (Jamie Babbit, Cherien Dabis, Directing for a Comedy Series), and Hulu’s “The Dropout” (Francesca Gregorini, Directing for a Limited Series).

Considering the sheer number of total nominations (there are 119 categories, after all), the number of openly queer contenders feels like a mere handful – especially in an era when television has made notable strides toward LGBTQ+ inclusion. Yet precisely for that reason, we can’t fault the Emmys for a lack of queer-friendliness based simply on the number of queer individuals it has chosen to recognize – because many of the shows represented in the list, including several major contenders in major categories, are fully queer-inclusive.

Most notable, arguably, are the number of queer characters represented among the acting categories. In addition to the nominees noted above, several straight-identifying performers are nominated for playing LGBTQ+ roles. 

Colin Firth’s starring turn in HBO’s true crime drama “The Staircase,” as bisexual accused murderer Michael Peterson, scored him a nod as Best Lead Actor in a Limited Series; Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh each received nominations for Lead Actress in a Drama Series for playing the lesbian assassin/lovers of Hulu’s “Killing Eve,” and their competition includes previous winner Zendaya, whose drug-addicted bisexual teenager is at the center of HBO’s hugely queer “Euphoria,” as well as Reese Witherspoon for her performance as a newly-out queer newscaster in Apple TV’s “The Morning Show”; Alex Borstein earned a richly-deserved nod for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy for her performance as queer comedy manager Susie Myerson in Amazon’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”; Kaitlyn Dever is nominated as Best Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie for playing a lesbian coal miner in Hulu’s “Dopesick”; and heavy-hitters John Turturro and Christopher Walken each got nominations for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama for playing gay men in Apple TV’s “Severence.”

Looking through a wider scope, it’s easy to see that queerness, while it may not always be front-and-center, permeates many of the shows nominated the list, and even if they didn’t make the cut in the acting categories, the recognition they receive is still a victory of LGBTQ+ inclusion.

For Best Comedy Series, the unapologetically queer “Hacks” – which won awards at last year’s ceremony for writing, directing, and Lead Actress Jean Smart – leads the pack, with “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and ABC’s much-buzzed-about “Abbot Elementary” likely running close behind. Other queer-inclusive shows in the category are FX’s “What We Do In the Shadows,” HBO’s “Barry,” and “Only Murders in the Building.”

For Drama, Showtime’s “Yellowjackets,” which has numerous queer female characters, might just ride its surprise hit status to victory on Emmy night, though the aforementioned “Euphoria” is likely to be a strong favorite.  “Severence” and Netflix’s hugely popular “Stranger Things,” which also include LGBTQ+ characters, are in the running, too.

In the Best Limited Series Category, “The White Lotus” – likely the favorite to win – and “Dopesick” are both heavily queer-inclusive.

Other LGBTQ+-relevant nominations of note include nods in the Best Reality Competition Show category for Amazon’s “Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls,” Bravo’s “Top Chef,” Netflix’s “Nailed It,” and VH1’s perennial Emmy favorite “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” which scored a few additional nods including one for RuPaul himself as Outstanding Host for a Reality or Competition Program; in the latter category, his competition includes all five of the hosts of Netflix’s “Queer Eye” (another Emmy favorite), which also picked up nods for its Production Design and Casting; YouTube’s “The Randy Rainbow Show” was nominated for Outstanding Short Form Comedy, Drama or Variety Series; and the race for Best Variety Sketch Series includes “SNL” and HBO’s “A Black Lady Sketch Show.”

There are also, of course, the inevitable snubs and disappointments. Omitted this year were Harvey Guillén (the loveable Guillermo of “What We Do in the Shadows”) and previous nominee Carl Clemons-Hopkins (“Hacks”) as Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series, as well as breakout trans actress Hunter Schafer (“Euphoria”); coming up empty-handed were also FX’s acclaimed LGTBQ-adjacent “Reservation Dogs” and HBO Max’s “Station Eleven” for Best Comedy and Drama Series, respectively.

Still, there will always be fans disappointed that their favorites didn’t make the cut, and one of the good things about being on a successful television series is the possibility of getting another chance next year, so our overall assessment of the Academy’s choices this year doesn’t suffer because of a few oversights.

There is, however, one glaring problem that gives us reservations about Emmy’s solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community – the choice to reward Netflix’s “The Closer,” Dave Chapelle’s aggressively transphobic stand-up “comedy” special with not one, but two nominations, for Outstanding Pre-Recorded Variety Special and Outstanding Directing for a Variety Special. Any recognition for a show that is essentially centered on the validation of transphobia sends a deeply troubling message.

For that reason, we can’t quite give the Emmys a pass this year on their commitment to acceptance and equality for all, despite the high marks on their scorecard for all the queer content and talent in this year’s competition. Instead, we have no choice but to strongly object to the Academy’s elevation of transphobia through the inclusion of Chapelle’s show among all these shining examples of what true LGBTQ+ representation looks like.

That doesn’t mean we won’t be rooting alongside all our readers for our favorites when the presentation of the Primetime Awards airs on September 12 – but no matter how many queer winners there may be that night, as far as we’re concerned, this year’s Emmys are already an epic fail.

You can find the full list of nominees on the Emmy website.