The Academy Awards are upon us once again, and innumerous gay Oscars watch parties are bound to take place this weekend. Viewers will be greeted with the brightest of Hollywood, movie magic, and plenty of Best Original Song performances.
What they won’t be greeted with, unfortunately, is a Lady Gaga spectacle. She won’t be performing her Top Gun: Maverick soundtrack single “Hold My Hand” at this year’s ceremony, much to Little Monsters’ chagrin.
Still, we’ve had many, MANY Best Original Song nominees to root for over the decades. Of the hundreds of nominations in the category, only eleven of the winners have ever publicly identified as LGBTQ+.
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We don’t want to toot our community’s horn too hard, but with Original Song entries like “Last Dance” and “Shallow” coming from queer artists, it’s kind of hard not to.
Welcome to the LGBTQ+ Best Original Song Hall of Fame:
Frederick Loewe
Loewe musical prowess helped 1958 Vincente Minnelli film Gigi make a clean sweep across all nine of its nominations at the Academy Awards, a feat that wouldn’t be bested for nearly 50 years.
Manos Hatzidakis
Though the English lyrics of title track “Never On Sunday” were written by Billy Towne, the original Greek song “Ta Pediá tou Pireá” was penned entirely by Hatzidakis. This marked a historic foreign language first for the category at the Academy Awards in 1960.
Paul Jabara
Something extra was enchanting Paul Jabara’s pen when he wrote Donna Summer’s iconic disco hit “Last Dance” for the 1978 film Thank God It’s Friday. It’s such an absolute jam that it picked up a Golden Globe and a Grammy, too.
Peter Allen
Allen collaborated with writers like Christopher Cross and Burt Bacharach to create an enduring theme for the 1981 film Arthur.
Howard Ashman
Ashman was nominated for Best Original Song an unthinkable seven times between 1986 and 1992, and scooped up wins for “Under the Sea” (1989) and “Beauty and the Beast” (1991). He won the latter award after his passing, becoming the first victim of HIV/AIDS to be awarded by the Academy posthumously.
Stephen Sondheim
In the midst of Ashman’s run of Disney song noms, the pinnacle of theater composition scooped up an Oscar for writing a song for Madonna to sing for 1990 film Dick Tracy. Not his usual fare, but he certainly put the desired bombast into it.
Elton John
Disney strikes again, winning for “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” from 1994’s The Lion King. John’s next Original Song win would come 25 years later for “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again” from his own biopic, Rocketman.
Melissa Etheridge
This lesbian folk icon winning an Oscar for personal responsibility anthem “I Need To Wake Up” from the 2006 climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth sounds a little like liberal Mad Libs, but that’s what’s fun about it!
Sam Smith
This was the win for the 2015 James Bond movie Spectre that prompted Smith to say they thought they were the “first openly gay Oscar winner”, which is honestly the level of delusion some of us love to see in a pop performer.
Benj Pasek
This half of Pasek & Paul successfully weaponized his BFA and got two noms for 2016 musical La La Land (and one for The Greatest Showman the following year) and brought it home with “City of Stars”.
Lady Gaga
And, of course, we have Gaga’s win for the hit A Star is Born song “Shallow” alongside Bradley Cooper. She was nominated again in 2023 for her Top Gun song “Hold My Hand”.
UPDATED: Billie Eilish
The bisexual musical prodigy won her first Oscar in 2022 for “No Time to Die”, the theme song for the James Bond film of the same name. 17 years old at the time of recording, Eilish was the youngest artist to have recorded a James Bond theme in the history of the franchise. In 2024, she was nominated again for “What Was I Made For?” from Barbie, becoming the only person born in the 21st century to be nominated twice for the Oscar.
