Tessa Thompson: Valkyrie and the Fight for Queer Stories

Most people know Tessa Thompson from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What's easy to miss from the ticket line is how much of her career runs on advocacy — she has become one of the industry's steadiest voices for LGBTQIA+ representation in media.

Thompson is a bisexual woman working at the top of a business that has historically preferred its stars quiet about such things. Her character Valkyrie has been called the MCU's first queer superhero. Playing queer characters is only part of it, though. Thompson keeps pushing, publicly, for LGBTQIA+ storylines in mainstream film — superhero movies included — that go deeper than a nod.

Acting isn't her only outlet. Thompson also makes music, and she carries the same commitments there — LGBTQIA+ visibility and representation, worked out in a different form.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaYvlVR_BEc

In her music she works through her own story as a bisexual woman, and the songs land with listeners in the LGBTQIA+ community who hear something of themselves in them. Art and advocacy sit side by side in the work rather than taking turns.

The music, like the acting, tests what the mainstream will make room for. It's one more place she gets to be fully herself in public — and one more argument that representation belongs in every medium, not only on screen.

The through-line is simple: representation matters. When Thompson pushes for inclusive storytelling, she makes it easier for other people — actors, writers, audiences — to show up as themselves. Visibility does real work on public perception and acceptance, and she treats it like the job it is.

During Black History Month, Thompson's place in the story is worth naming. She's a Black bisexual woman, which puts her at an intersection where the fight for one community's recognition is tied to the fight for another's. She carries both.

Change in Hollywood is slow, but it happens, and Thompson's career shows one way it happens: keep working, keep talking, keep asking for more than the industry planned to give.

Her example carries past the screen. Being open about who she is has given a lot of people permission to be open too. That's the kind of role model worth having — one who does it in public, on purpose.