Billy Porteris proudly living his truth!
Whileappearingas a guest onThe Tonight ShowThursday, the 51-year-old actor opened up about how his life has been since publicly revealing hisHIV diagnosisearlier this month.
“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.”
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Porter opened up about his positive HIV diagnosis in a candid essay forTHR, published on May 19, where he called the year he learned of his sickness “the worst year of [his] life.”
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 forpeople to discriminate against mein 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 hegoes 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,” thePosestar said. “This is what HIV-positive looks like now. I’m going to die from something else before I die from that.”
“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 hisPosecast and crew, crediting a conversation with show co-creatorRyan Murphyduring 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 toldTHR. “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.”
source: people.com
