Billy Porter opens up about his HIV-positive status on ‘The Tonight Show’: ‘I released that shame’
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Billy Porter on the May 27 episode of “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon. Andrew Lipovsky/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
Billy Porter opened up about his HIV-positive status in a recent episode of “The Tonight Show.”
The “Pose” star revealed earlier this month that he’d been living with HIV for 14 years.
“I’ve never felt joy like this before,” Porter told Fallon of opening up about his status.
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“Pose” star Billy Porter opened up about his recent decision to share his HIV-positive status on Thursday’s episode of “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon.
After revealing that he’d been HIV-positive since 2007, the actor explained that it was initially hard for him to deal with his diagnosis.
“Having lived through the AIDs crisis, it was heavy for me,” Porter said. “It was a heavy year, 2007, and I lived with the same of it for a really long time.”
Porter first spoke out about his diagnosis in the May 19 cover story for The Hollywood Reporter. The award-winning star told Fallon that sharing his HIV status was liberating.
“Last week I released that shame, I released that trauma, and I am a free man, honey!” Porter said on Fallon’s show.
Porter said he didn’t even tell his mother about his diagnosis, due to societal stigmas surrounding the virus and homosexuality.
The actor told Fallon, however, that he recently did share the news with his mother and was in general happy to be open about his HIV experience.
“I’ve never felt joy like this before,” Porter said. “It really feels good, it really feels great.”
Porter revealed in The Hollywood Reporter’s cover story that he was diagnosed with HIV in 2007 and kept his diagnosis private out of fear the entertainment industry would reject him.
“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,” Porter said in the article. “HIV-positive, where I come from, growing up in the Pentecostal church with a very religious family, is God’s punishment.”
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The 51-year-old also told the publication that his role on “Pose” as Prey Tell, an HIV-positive man, allowed him to speak his truth unashamedly.
As the show’s popularity skyrocketed, Porter wanted to tell his own story and be a voice for the 325,000 people killed in the US between 1987 and 1998 during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, a majority of them being queer and trans people.
“I’m living so that I can tell the story. There’s a whole generation that was here, and I stand on their shoulders,” Porter said.
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