Billy Porter has revealed that he’s been HIV-positive since 2007 in a new emotional essay for The Hollywood Reporter.
The actor and activist explained that he’s been living with HIV for the last 14 years. “I had a pimple on my butt, and it got larger and larger and harder and harder, and then it started to hurt,” Porter remembered.
“I got tested every six months, like you were supposed to. So I went in, got the pimple drained and got tested, and then the doctor came back and looked at me. I was like, “What?” He sat down, and I was like, “No. Nooo.” And he said, “Your test came back positive.”
Fearing marginalisation, Porter told basically no one else about it. It was only last year that he fully started to confront what had happened to him. “I’d never been given the luxury to even think about self-care or balance on any level before,” he said. “COVID created a safe space for me to stop and reflect and deal with the trauma in my life. In the last year, I started real trauma therapy to begin the process of healing.
I started peeling back all these layers: having been sent to a psychologist at age 5 because I came out of the womb a big old queen; being sexually abused by my stepfather from the time I was 7 to the time I was 12; coming out at 16 in the middle of the AIDS crisis. There has never been a moment that I’ve not been in trauma.”
Porter discussed how his acting role in a show like Pose, where his character is also HIV-positive, helped him process his trauma, his character acting as a proxy: “I was able to say everything that I wanted to say through a surrogate.”
The star also revealed the heartbreaking process of finally admitting it to his mother. After shooting season three of Pose, Porter couldn’t hold it in any longer and told her everything in a call.
“She 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,”” he said.
Today, thankfully, Porter’s HIV is “completely undetectable,” meaning that it can no longer be transmitted through sex. As he achingly put it in his essay, ” survived so that I could tell the story.”
Read Porter’s full essay here.
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Watch Porter discuss his diagnosis with THR:
