The annual awards, now in its 27th year, recognises members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities for fair, accurate and inclusive representations.

Rose, who stars in the Netflix series Orange Is The New Black, won the Stephen F Kolzak award for a media professional who has made a "significant difference in promoting equality and acceptance for the community".

Rose, 30, is in prestigious company - previous winners of the award include Melissa Etheridge, Ellen DeGeneres and Sir Ian McKellen.

The top award was presented to the Australian DJ and actor by none other than Taylor Swift, a surprise guest at the event, held at the Beverly Hilton ballroom.

"Tonight, I'm here to honour someone who through her words and through her actions proves that she is a force of nature. She tells the world that no one can judge us and no one can stop us," Swift gushed. "She is a woman of many talents. She is my friend."

Swift was later photographed with Rose and Australian wunderkind Troye Sivan.

In her acceptance speech, Rose talked about her childhood in Australia, telling the crowd she had struggled to find a role model as a young lesbian girl, and that for a large part of her life she "wanted to be invisible".

"I felt there was so much wrong with me and there was so much weird about me," she said, adding that while she was "out" from the age of 12, she "felt discomfort in anything feminine".

"I practiced looking like a boy. Still do. I got appalled when I got breasts. Sometimes, still do. I spent a lot of time in a very vulnerable place with little to no support," she said.

Rose said she had been "stalked, verbally abused and beaten until I was hospitalised" leading her to suicide attempts, before eventually finding solace in the library.

"I dreamt of being a famous singer or an actor who, through my work, could inspire others to be themselves or hang in there. I had no idea how I dreamt so big when I felt so small, but I know it got me through each day. I wanted to be the person I couldn't find in my life."

She added that the television series The L Word "probably saved her life", when she could find characters she could relate to.

"It made me feel like I existed," Rose said. "Slowly but surely, year after year, I watched the world change. GLAAD was there pushing the studios to do better."

Other award winners on Saturday included singer Demi Lovato, Matrix filmmaker Lilly Wachowski, in her first public appearance since coming out as transgender last month, who won for Best Outstanding Drama series as co-creator of the Netflix series Sense8, Caitlyn Jenner, who took out Best Outstanding Reality Series for I Am Cait (and who has just been announced as a guest star in the upcoming third series of Amazon's Transparent), and singer Ricky Martin who won Outstanding Music Artist.