Janelle Monáe to Receive HRC Equality Award

Award-winning singer, actor, producer, performer, and activist Janelle Monae will receive the Human Rights Campaign's Equality Award March 28 at the 2020 HRC Los Angeles Dinner

"A highly celebrated and influential artist, Janelle Monae is an icon who has used her global platform to share a message of celebrating authenticity and embracing all of who we are," HRC President Alphonso David said in a press release. "Through her activism on initiatives that work to inspire civic engagement and advance gender justice, Janelle has been a guiding force for positive change. We are incredibly excited to honor Janelle Monae with the HRC Equality Award at the 2020 Los Angeles Dinner."

Monae, who is pansexual and recently tweeted that she is nonbinary, is a singer-songwriter who has received eight Grammy nominations, and an actor in such films as Hidden Figures, Harriet, UglyDolls, and Antebellum, out this spring, in which she will play her first leading movie role. She will also have her first television lead as Jackie in season 2 of Amazon's Homecoming, and later this year will appear in the Gloria Steinem biopic The Glorias: A Life on the Road, in which she plays Dorothy Pitman Hughes.

When she released her 2018 album Dirty Computer, which was nominated for two Grammys, she dedicated it to young LGBTQ people. "I want young girls, young boys, nonbinary, gay, straight, queer people who are having a hard time dealing with their sexuality, dealing with feeling ostracized or bullied for just being their unique selves, to know that I see you," Monae told Rolling Stone. Later, in a comment to Variety, she dedicated her nominations to her "trans brothers and sisters."

As an activist, she is a cochair of When We All Vote, an organization dedicated to increasing participation in every election and close the race and age gap by changing the culture around voting, and leads the Fem the Future initiative with her artist collective Wondaland. The initiative empowers female media creatives and filmmakers and furthers the conversation about opportunity for all those who identify as women within arts, music, and film.

The dinner, which will take place at the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown, is the first since HRC opened its L.A. office. It brings together HRC's most active members and supporters in the area to raise funds for the fight for LGBTQ equality. Tickets and further information are available here.