Kate McKinnon Moves Golden Globes Audience to Tears With Glowing Tribute to Ellen DeGeneres

By Meghan O'Keefe @megsokay
Published Jan. 5, 2020, 9:10 p.m. ET

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Golden Globes 2020

Saturday Night Live star Kate McKinnon dazzled the audience at the 2020 Golden Globes with a hilarious and heartfelt tribute to Ellen DeGeneres, the 2020 recipient of the Carol Burnett Award for Excellence in Television. McKinnon used the opportunity to talk about the comic and trailblazer’s influence on her own life, noting that DeGeneres’s brave decision to come out as gay in public and on her sitcom helped her in her youth. “If I hadn’t seen her on TV, I would have thought ‘I could never be on TV. They don’t let LGBT people be on TV.’ And more than that, I would have gone on thinking that I was an alien and that I maybe didn’t have a right to be here,” McKinnon said, holding back tears.

Today Ellen DeGeneres is best known as one of America’s most beloved talk show hosts, but there was a time when she used her popularity to challenge norms and stand up for the LGBTQ community. Specifically, her decision to come out as gay in the mid-’90s was brave — and it forced backlash. As DeGeneres herself noted in the montage of clips honoring her career during the Golden Globes, her decision to come out both in real life and on her sitcom cost her that show, and made her something of a pariah in Hollywood for a while.

Kate McKinnon chose to introduce the award by remembering the impact that DeGeneres’s decision had on her as a child. Clutching a small piece of torn notebook paper, McKinnon’s voice shook a little as she recalled how seeing Ellen DeGeneres on television not only made it okay for her to realize that she was gay, but inspired her to pursue comedy. “Am I gay?” she asked, reminiscing about being a teenager lifting weights in the basement and watching Ellen. “And I was. And I still am… and the only thing that made it less risky was seeing Ellen on TV.”

McKinnon’s tribute was pitch perfect as it reminded the audience of the power of representation and how bold DeGeneres was in the 1990s — and why her impact on television extends to the hearts and homes of everyday Americans.