Award-winning gay Broadway actor and activist Gavin Creel dead at 48

Gavin Creel, an award-winning Broadway star and marriage equality activist, has died at age 48.

He died of metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma, a rare type of cancer, The New York Times reports. His partner, actor Alex Temple Ward, announced Creel’s death through a publicist. Creel died Monday at his home in Manhattan.

“Mr. Creel was a well-liked member of the New York theater community whose death comes as a shock, given his age,” the Times notes. Just last winter, he was performing in Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice, a show he wrote about his experiences at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at off-Broadway’s MCC Theater.

A native of Ohio, Creel made his Broadway debut in 2002 as Jimmy Smith, the love interest for Sutton Foster’s Millie, in the 1920s-set musical Thoroughly Modern Millie. He received his first Tony Award nomination for that performance. He was nominated again for the revival of Hair in 2009 and won the award as Featured Actor in a Musical for his role as Cornelius Hackl, a small-town store clerk seeking love and adventure in New York City, in the 2017 production of Hello, Dolly!, which starred Bette Midler. He additionally received the Drama Desk Award for that show.

His other Broadway roles include Jean-Michel, a straight man raised by a gay couple, in the 2004-2005 revival of La Cage aux Folles; Elder Price in The Book of Mormon in 2015-2016, after playing the part on tour; and Cinderella’s Prince and the Wolf in Into the Woods, on tour as well, in 2022-2023. He also performed in The Book of Mormon in London, winning the Olivier Award.

He had some television roles, which included starring with Matt Bomer in Rubber (Wo)man, part of Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Stories series, in 2021. They played a gay couple who move into a haunted house with their teenage daughter.

In 2011, as a marriage equality bill was pending in New York State, Creel and other Broadway performers appeared in a video for the New Yorkers for Marriage Equality series from the Human Rights Campaign. He and fellow Broadway star Rory O’Malley had founded a pro-equality organization, Broadway Impact. The bill eventually became law.

He came out in an Advocate interview in 2009 while appearing in Hair. “I also want to be able to get married legally, and it doesn’t make any sense for me to parade around trying to get marriage equality while not being open about who I am,” he told The Advocate at the time. “It doesn’t inspire young men and women struggling with their own sexuality to be confident in who they are if I’m not confident in who I am. And if I whisper about it, then I give other people the power to whisper about it, and there’s nothing wrong with it.”

The Advocate's sibling outlet The Advocate Channel spoke to Creel last year about his work. Check out the interview below.