Actor and style icon Billy Porter has recently revealed that he has been living with HIV for the past 14 years, according to BBC.
The 51-year-old star was diagnosed with the condition in 2007. He said he had since then he “lived with that shame in silence.”
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Porter said, “There’s no more stigma – let’s be done with that. It’s time.”
He won a Tony Award for his role in the musical Kinky Boots in 2013 and an Emmy in 2019 for playing Pray Tell on the 1980s New York ballroom scene, in Ryan Murphy’s acclaimed TV drama Pose.
Porter also earned Golden Globes nominations for best TV drama actor in 2019 and 2020.
About contracting HIV, he said, “I was the generation that was supposed to know better, and it happened anyway.”
“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,” he continued. “HIV-positive, where I come from, growing up in the Pentecostal church with a very religious family, is God’s punishment.”
Porter went on to say that he told “everybody who needed to know,” explaining, “I was trying to have a life and a career, and I wasn’t certain I could if the wrong people knew. It would just be another way for people to discriminate against me in an already discriminatory profession. So I tried to think about it as little as I could. I tried to block it out.”
The star said he wanted to make it public because “it’s time to grow up and move on because shame is destructive – and if not dealt with, it can destroy everything in its path.”
Porter did not even tell his mother about his diagnosis until recently. He said, “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,” the singer continued. “That’s what I was waiting for if I’m being honest. When we moved her into the Actors Fund Nursing Home, I was like, ‘She’s not going to be here long, and then I’ll write my book and come out and she won’t have to live with the embarrassment of having an HIV-positive child.’”
“That was five years ago,” he added, “She ain’t going anywhere.”
Porter and his sister made a plan to visit her to break the news, but he decided to call her over the phone on the last day of filming Pose.
He said, “Not two minutes into the conversation, she’s like, ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘Nothing.’ She’s like, ‘Son, please tell me what’s wrong.’ So I ripped the Band-Aid off and I told her.”
His mother said, “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.”
Porter said revealing his HIV diagnosis has set him free. He said, “And it’s all true. It’s my own shame. Years of trauma make a human being skittish. But the truth shall set you free. I feel my heart releasing.” “This is what HIV-positive looks like now,” he added. “I’m going to die from something else before I die from that. My T-cell levels are twice yours because of this medication.”
