Alan Cumming Wore a Trans Pride Pin While Accepting an Emmy for The Traitors
Kevin Winter
For close to a decade, few things have felt more assured at the annual Emmy Awards than ongoing success for RuPaul’s Drag Race. Starting with its eighth season in 2016, the popular drag competition has been near inescapable, earning an impressive five wins in the overall Outstanding Reality Competition category and an almost unheard-of eight wins for RuPaul as its illustrious host. (And that’s not to mention all the extra awards it’s nabbed for editing, costumes, and production design.) Though Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls slipped in a win in 2022, Drag Race was right back at it the following year, as if nothing had changed. For a while, it seemed like its reign would never let up.
But that was before the general public got wind of Peacock’s wildly entertaining series The Traitors, which, in its all-reality star second season, took the nation by storm, quickly becoming the only thing anyone could talk about — a watercooler series every cool person in your life insisted on clearing their schedule to watch live.
Though the show could sometimes be heartbreaking for its queer viewers — I’m still mourning the first-out elimination of trans drag artist Peppermint (who, coincidentally enough, is a veteran of Drag Race herself) — no series on television kept us more entertained. And no host kept us more gagged than Alan Cumming. (And yes, I am counting RuPaul.)
And now, we can thank The Traitors for reminding us all that, indeed, there are more reality competition series on air than RuPaul’s Drag Race. After Alan Cumming won the award for Outstanding Host of a Reality Series last weekend, putting an end to RuPaul’s eight-year streak in the process, the show itself was announced as the overall winner for Outstanding Competition Series at Sunday night’s primetime ceremony — a feat many of us thought impossible.
While accepting the honor, Cumming said, “We are so grateful because we are a new show, and you guys, when you like something, you tend to stick to it, which is a good quality, so we appreciate it all the more.” Later, he thanked the show’s streaming service, Peacock, saying, “It’s so great to be a part of a new streaming service,” and the show’s cast and crew, who he pointed out “work so hard and get so wet with the Scottish weather.”
But the moment’s biggest message came from its smallest object. While accepting the award, Cumming proudly sported a tiny medal, which he wore pinned to the lapel of his suit jacket. A “military merit” that Cumming jazzed up with the trans flag, the medal made a huge statement about trans rights — a cause Cumming has continuously voiced his support for, using his platform to advocate for the wider LGBTQ+ community. It was touching and powerful. On the show, Alan Cumming may just be a host — but tonight, our host was definitely giving Faithful.
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