VF: IIf you haven’t heard of Lena Waithe, check yourself for a pulse. She is disrupting the hell out of Hollywood. As the first black woman to nail an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series, Lena—along with a crew of other black creatives—is sending a message to the world that Black Brilliance has arrived in Hollywood and has not come to play.
Lena and I sit down to dinner for the first time, at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. Having spent the past week in Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, both of us are beyond happy to be rid of our snow boots and winter coats. And because I’ve arrived at the restaurant a few minutes before Lena, I’ve had time to do what many of us do when we walk into spaces like this—count the Blacks. Now that Lena has joined me, there are two of us.
In this moment the shine is on Lena. She is all dapper and grace as she enters. Broad-shouldered and fast-walking, she flashes a smile at our hostess and emphasizes her please-and-thank-yous with our waitress. When she sits down across from me, she immediately removes her cap, and I smile, having grown up watching the boys and men around me get chastised for not removing their hats fast enough, for attempting to wear hats at the table, for even considering walking into someone else’s home or a restaurant with their heads covered. Lena’s locks are well oiled and tightly twisted, draping down past her shoulders—a femme contrast to the shaved sides of her head.
I begin to see that this is who Lena is: a woman coming at the world from many different places, quick-moving and fast-talking yet soft-spoken and thoughtful, cursing a mile a minute while bringing a new vibrancy to language. Relaxed yet ready. On the butch side of queer but with delicate edges. Star power with kindness. And it’s working.
“Here’s the irony of it all,” she says after the conversation gets going. “I don’t need an Emmy to tell me to go to work. I’ve been working. I’ve been writing, I’ve been developing, I’ve been putting pieces together and I’m bullets, you know what I’m saying?”
I do. On the critically acclaimed Netflix series Master of None, for which she won her Emmy, Lena, 33, also plays the role of Denise, a young lesbian and close friend of Aziz Ansari’s character, Dev. While Denise was originally written for a straight woman, who would eventually become a love interest of Dev’s, Waithe’s character has added a depth, humor, and black-girl queerness new to the screen. She’s wry, lovely, and lovable. And while Lena’s Denise seems to be handpicked from Lena’s life story, Waithe brings to this character something different. Denise is more reserved than Lena. It’s not so much an innocence but angles smoothed over, the product of a quieter past. Many of the people in my own queer world would have blinked past the show had it not been for Waithe’s character. For so many of us who have not seen an out Black lesbian front and center this way, her arrival is a small, long-awaited revelation. Her arrival is our arrival.
