America’s self-proclaimed “Gaysian Sweetheart”, award-winning actor and comedian Alec Mapa got his big break when he starred as Song Liling in the first national tour of M. Butterfly, a multi-award-winning Broadway play that mixed Puccini’s Madame Butterfly with the true story of an affair between a French diplomat and a Chinese opera singer-turned-spy. In the years since, he has built a formidable resume of TV work, with recurring roles in hit series such as Ugly Betty, Half and Half, and Switched at Birth.
Mapa’s career has been filled with guest roles in some of the biggest sitcoms of the last 30 years, including Friends, Seinfeld, Roseanne, Desperate Housewives, 2 Broke Girls, and Rules of Engagement. He has also appeared in several major films including Marley & Me, Who’s Your Daddy, and Playing by Heart. His theatre work outside of M. Butterfly has also been remarkable, playing in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens on Broadway and being nominated for a Lortel Award for his part in the off-Broadway play Dogeaters.
As a comedian, he has had similar success. His 2012 one-man show, Alec Mapa: Baby Daddy, was centred around his and his husband’s journey in adopting an older African-American child. It was such a success that it was turned into a concert film in 2014. By that time, it had already won the Bistro Award for Best Comedy Monologue. The film went on to win the Fusion Achievement Award at LGBT-orientated film festival Outfest and was named as one the year’s top LGBT documentaries by The Advocate magazine.
