The 2016 Legacy Awards will take place on Sunday, October 23 at performing arts venue Vibiana in downtown Los Angeles, with head chef Neal Fraser (Redbird). Merrill Lynch will return as the Presenting Sponsor.
As previously announced, Soloway will be honored with the Visionary Award, which recognizes artistic and creative contributions to the LGBT media visibility for a body of work that includes “Transparent.” Hayes is receiving the Trailblazer Award in recognition of his exemplary career as a stage, film, television, and recording artist and for his longtime, passionate support of the LGBT community. Freeform is receiving the Corporate Trailblazer Award in recognition of its groundbreaking programming for young adults -- people in high school, college and the decade that follows -- which includes such LGBT-friendly programs including “Pretty Little Liars,” “The Fosters,” and “Shadowhunters.”
The Legacy Awards serves as a fundraiser to support the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project. Outfest and UCLA Film & Television Archive partnered in 2005 to create the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project, the only program in the world exclusively dedicated to saving and preserving LGBT moving images. The Legacy Project is aimed at the crisis in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender moving-image archiving. Many of the landmark LGBT films produced over the last 40-plus years are already in danger of fading away; their original exhibition prints are in tatters, and their negatives are in woeful storage conditions or even lost. For the last 11 years, the Legacy Project is proud to have collected more than 36,000 moving-image items and to have restored 24 historically important film and video projects.
Previous Legacy Award honorees include Tom Hanks (Philadelphia), Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right), Armistead Maupin (“Tales of the City”), Hilary Swank (Boys Don’t Cry), Lee Daniels (“Empire”), Craig Zadan and Neil Meron (Chicago) Adam Shankman (Hairspray), Roland Emmerich (Stonewall), Alan Poul (“The Newsroom”), Bruce Cohen (Silver Linings Playbook), and Paris Barclay (“Glee”).
