Billy Porter, the Primetime Emmy Award-winning actor best known for his performance as a HIV patient in Pose, revealed that he was diagnosed with HIV and type-2 diabetes in 2007. Porter, who will be seen as the fairy godmother in the recent version of Cinderella featuring Camila Cabello, told The Hollywood Reporter that he was alive despite testing positive so that “I can tell the story”.
Stating that he had to deal with the “shame” of testing HIV positive, he said, “…it was just the shame that it had happened in the first place. And as a Black person, particularly a Black man on this planet, you have to be perfect or you will get killed… Yes, I am the statistic, but I’ve transcended it. This is what HIV-positive looks like now. I’m going to die from something else before I die from that.”
The actor who came out as gay at the age of 16, and has been taking therapy since he was 25, said that he currently visits the doctor every three months and said that this was the “healthiest” he has felt in years.
He said that 2007 was “the worst year” in his life when he, then a Broadway performer, found out that he was suffering from HIV and diabetes and was also bankrupt. “The shame of that time compounded with the shame that had already [accumulated] in my life silenced me, and I have lived with that shame in silence for 14 years.”
Coming from a religious family affiliated to the Pentecostal Church, HIV, according to him, “is God’s punishment.”
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Porter, however, decided to keep the news from his mother, who, he said, “had been through so much already, so much persecution by her religious community because of my queerness, that I just didn’t want her to have to live through their ‘I told you so’s.’ I didn’t want to put her through that. I was embarrassed. I was ashamed. I was the statistic that everybody said I would be. So I’d made a pact with myself that I would let her die before I told her.” He said that he had planned on writing his memoir and come out as gay after his mother’s death.
However, on the last day of shooting Pose, that went on for three seasons, he called up his mother and told her everything, and said that he felt his “…heart releasing. It had felt like a hand was holding my heart clenched for years — for years — and it’s all gone.”
His mother, upon discovering that Porter had carried it for so long, told him, “You’ve been carrying this around for 14 years? Don’t ever do this again. I’m your mother, I love you no matter what. And I know I didn’t understand how to do that early on, but it’s been decades now.”
The Covid-19 pandemic came as a boon for Porter as it “created a safe space” and gave him a chance “to stop and reflect and deal with the trauma in my life.”
My truth. In my time. Thank you @THR. https://t.co/QWLe8jfdrc
— Billy Porter (@theebillyporter) May 19, 2021
Despite the hardship and the marginalisation, he said that he lived his story served him in terms of “forward motion” with most of his characters both on-stage and on-screen drawing from his lived experiences.
The “trajectory of my character, Lola” from his Broadway production Kinky Boots that earned him a Tony Award for the Best Actor in a Musical, “was about forgiving her father. To be given the gift of practicing forgiveness in a narrative eight times a week for three years, I was allowing myself to forgive my father onstage and both of them [my father and my stepfather] in the ground. Every day was another release,” he said.
Porter called his character Pray Tell from Pose his “surrogate”, through whom he was able to convey everything, and at the same time he was being taken seriously as an actor.
The actor, who is married to Adam Smith, said: “The truth is the healing. And I hope this frees me… I don’t care what anyone has to say. You’re either with me or simply move out of the way.”