For 14 years, Billy Porter hid his HIV diagnosis from almost everyone he knew. But now, after playing out his reality on the TV series “Pose,” the Emmy-winning actor is sharing his own story.
Porter, 51, was diagnosed in 2007 after a routine test, he told the Hollywood Reporter in a cover story out Wednesday. For more than a decade, he hid his secret until the COVID-19 pandemic, during which he and his husband tucked away in a rented house on Long Island, ”created a safe space for me to stop and reflect and deal with the trauma in my life.”
“There’s happiness, yes; there’s surface joy, but there was also a feeling of dread, all day, every day,” Porter told the Hollywood Reporter. “It wasn’t a fear that [my status] was going to come out or that somebody was going to expose me; 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. But look at me. Yes, I am the statistic, but I’ve transcended it. This is what HIV-positive looks like now.”
On “Pose,” now in its third and last season on FX, Porter plays Pray Tell, the emcee of the ball scene who was diagnosed with HIV in the first season. The role, Porter said, allowed him to “say everything that I wanted to say through a surrogate” before he was ready to use his own voice.
“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,” he told the Hollywood Reporter.
