A look at the work and allyship of Gabrielle Union
Gabrielle Union has been a very vocal ally to the LGBTQ+ community and is actively using her platform and body of work to help tell our stories.
The successful actress and Hollywood mainstay made headlines last year when she and her husband, professional basketball player Dwayne Wade, went public with the news that their daughter Zaya had come out as transgender in 2020. The pair have been extremely loving and supportive of Zaya who they said began showing signs of her gender identity at three years of age.
Since her daughter came out, Union has made a point of participating in more LGBT-centric projects. She is currently starring in The Inspection as Inez French, a hard hearted and homophobic mother to a young queer man desperately chasing after his mother’s approval. She is simultaneously starring in Strange World, an animated family adventure from Disney where she and Jake Gyllenhaal play the parents of a gay teen.
Union is evidently extremely proud of her work and proud to align herself with our community telling Variety “A lot of folks are trying to erase whole chunks of our population and trying to reimagine reality without LGBTQIA folks. The reality is, we exist everywhere, every part of the globe.”
The She’s All That actress is also producing a movie called Got To Be through her production company I’ll Have Another. The film is about high schoolers travelling to New York City for their first Pride Parade. The story, of course, is inspired by Zaya who asked her parents to attend her first Pride parade when she was ten years old. The film will be directed by none other than Billy Porter.
Speaking about the film’s plot to Variety she said: “It’s a group of diverse kids. One is a chubby Asian, another is a Black nonbinary — I don’t want to say a diva or divo, but an extravagant, dynamic larger personality — and then there’s a white bisexual boy.”
The film is still in its casting stage, but Union is making sure to push for authentic casting adding- “I believe that it is important to have real representation so we’re not play-acting at what it is to be queer.”
And if all that isn’t enough, she also shared the news that she and Eva Longoria are working together on developing an LGBTQ wedding comedy for Amazon Studios. They will be co-producing and co-starring in an as yet untitled feature as two mothers whose sons are getting married.
With a resumé like that it is clear that Union is putting her money where her mouth is when it comes to her allyship and activism. It’s a beautiful thing to see. Zaya is a very lucky young lady.
