Billy Porter Says He’s a ‘Free Man’ After Revealing HIV Diagnosis: ‘I’ve Never Felt Joy Like This’
Porter #Porter
Billy Porter is proudly living his truth!
While appearing as a guest on The Tonight Show Thursday, the 51-year-old actor opened up about how his life has been since publicly revealing his HIV diagnosis earlier this month.
When asked by host Jimmy Fallon to speak about his recent The Hollywood Reporter cover, where he revealed the health news, Porter said, “I’ve been positive since 2007. And, you know, having lived through the AIDS crisis, it was heavy for me. It was a heavy year, 2007.”
“I lived with the shame of it for a really long time and last week I released that shame, I released that trauma and I am a free man, honey! Free!” Porter continued, amid cheers from the in-studio audience. “I’ve never felt joy like this before.”
“And, you know, we talk about it in the Black church. You know, this joy that I have — the world didn’t give and the world can’t take it away,” he added. “I got it. I got some joy now. It really feels good, it really feels great.”
RELATED: Billy Porter, Chase Stokes, Justin Baldoni and More Come Together to Talk Men and Mental Health
Porter opened up about his positive HIV diagnosis in a candid essay for THR, published on May 19, where he called the year he learned of his sickness “the worst year of [his] life.”
“I was the generation that was supposed to know better, and it happened anyway,” wrote Porter. “I was on the precipice of obscurity for about a decade or so, but 2007 was the worst of it. By February, I had been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. By March, I signed bankruptcy papers. And by June, I was diagnosed HIV-positive.”
He went on to say that “everybody who needed to know, knew” about his diagnosis “for a long time,” except for his mother.
“I was trying to have a life and a career, and I wasn’t certain I could if the wrong people knew,” he detailed. “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. But quarantine has taught me a lot. Everybody was required to sit down and shut the f— up.”
Of his diagnosis, Porter said that he goes to the doctor “every three months” and is “the healthiest I’ve been in my entire life.”
“Yes, I am the statistic, but I’ve transcended it,” the Pose star said. “This is what HIV-positive looks like now. I’m going to die from something else before I die from that.”
Later during his chat with Fallon, 46, Porter was asked by the late-night host to share more about how he made the decision to initially not tell his own mother of his diagnosis.
“You know, growing up in the Pentecostal church, there’s such a stigma surrounding it,” he said. “Having lived through it, I was supposed to know better, [but] it happened anyway.”
“There was just so much going on, and my mother received so much persecution because I was gay, and I just didn’t want her to have to go through that again,” Porter continued. “It’s sort of like a second coming out and I didn’t want to go through that again.”
RELATED VIDEO: Billy Porter Reveals He Was Diagnosed as HIV-Positive 14 Years Ago: ‘The Truth Is the Healing’
Detailing that he and his sister decided they were instead going to wait until she died to share the news publicly, Porter said his mother entered a nursing home “6 years ago” and “she ain’t going nowhere.”
“She’s full of life,” the Emmy award winning star added. “So it’s the time to tell her.”
Porter did end up telling his mother and his Pose cast and crew, crediting a conversation with show co-creator Ryan Murphy during its first season — in which Murphy, 55, encouraged Porter to “lean in to the joy” of his character — as inspiration.
“I told them the truth because, at a certain point, the truth is the responsible road. The truth is the healing,” he told THR. “And I hope this frees me. I hope this frees me so that I can experience real, unadulterated joy, so that I can experience peace, so that I can experience intimacy so that I can have sex without shame.”