Sorry Trump, this year’s Emmy nominations prove diversity is one of America’s greatest strengths

If art imitated life, the Emmy Award nominations for 2025 would look very different and very, very boring.

The real world, on both sides of the pond, is currently dominated by attempts to ban transgender and gender-diverse folk from certain spaces, to strip equality and diversity initiatives from workplaces, and to paint drag queens as predators. Yet TV and film, and therefore art, is dominated by the overwhelming presence of LGBTQ+ excellence.

The Emmy nominations for 2025, announced yesterday (15 July), serve proof that queer people are currently driving art and culture forward on the biggest stages. Records were broken. History was made.

RuPaul, the host of international phenomenon RuPaul’s Drag Race, bagged his tenth Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality Competition Program nod, becoming the most-nominated TV host in the category, ever. In the process, the drag legend retained his title as the most Emmy nominated person of colour in history. It seems that the only people who should be scared of drag queens are Project Runway‘s Heidi Klum and Dancing With the Stars‘ Tom Bergeron, who are now trailing behind RuPaul’s record.

Drag Race also earned its ninth consecutive nomination in the Outstanding Reality Competition Program; a category it has previously won in five times – more than any other reality show.

Ayo Edebiri, queer star of The Bear, is also making Emmy history, becoming the first Black woman to be nominated in both a directing and acting category in the same year. Fans of the nail-biting comedy-drama The Bear will know that she is rightfully nominated in the Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for playing chef Sydney in the show. She’s also up in the Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series category, for her role helming “Napkins”, episode six of season three of the FX series. Edebiri is the second-ever woman to manage the feat; only Girls star and creator Lena Dunham has done it before her.

While the Trump administration focuses on erasing Black history from schools and rolling back diversity initiatives, the 2025 Emmy nominations prove that diversity is one of the country’s greatest strengths. Trump wants to make America great again? On the cultural front at least, actors like Edebiri are already on it.

Saturday Night Live star Bowen Yang has this year sketched his name into the history books, too. After becoming the first Chinese-American to be added to the permanent SNL cast back in 2019, yesterday, he became the Emmy’s most nominated Asian male actor.

He’s bagged four acting nominations now in the Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series category for his SNL roles, plus another nod for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series back in 2019. Yang, who is gay, is well on his way to becoming one of the most notable queer Asian stars of the century, and there is no more important time for it to happen.

Arguably most important this year specifically, though, is Bella Ramsey’s nomination. The actor has just become the first non-binary performer to be nominated more than once for an Emmy, both times in the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series category, both for HBO apocalypse drama The Last of Us. Again, perhaps Ramsey is only a threat to mutated, marauding Infected.

For some, the categorisation might be controversial. Ramsey isn’t an actress, as they aren’t a woman. And yet perhaps this year, the debate around gendered award categories feels a little hollow. Perhaps this year, the crunch point is that Ramsey is more visible than ever, at a time where right-wingers would love them to be distinctly less visible, invisible in fact. While the MAGA bros and shonky politicians insist that trans and non-binary people are wrong, or are villains, or should be erased, here is Ramsey doing everything right, as a hero, and getting celebrated for it.

It’s been said by so many queer folk feeling under threat in recent months, but it’s too true to become cliché, and the Emmy 2025 nominations prove it once again: queer people will always be here, quietly thriving, be it on stage at the Emmys, or on the sofa watching them happen.

The 2025 Emmy Awards take place on 14 September.

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