Billy Porter just revealed that he is HIV positive but kept it a secret for more than a decade.
The 51-year-old actor has broken his silence to The Hollywood Reporter and admitted that he kept his diagnosis a secret as he was ‘ashamed.’ He also feared that the revelation would ruin his career.
“For a long time, everybody who needed to know, knew – except for my mother,” he said.
“I was trying to have a life and a career and I wasn’t certain I could if the wrong people knew. It would just be another way for people to discriminate against me in an already discriminatory profession,” the award-winning actor continued.
“So I tried to think about it as little as I could. I tried to block it out.”
Porter lived with a feeling of dread until he finally decided to reveal his diagnosis.
“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,” he expressed.
Porter revealed how he kept his diagnosis secret from his mother for years as she had already faced a lot of ‘persecution’ from her Pentecostal church when he came out as gay at the age of 16.
“I didn’t want to put her through that. I was embarrassed. I was ashamed,” he said.
“I was the statistic that everybody said I would be. So I’d made a pact with myself that I would let her die before I told her. That’s what I was waiting for, if I’m being honest.”
But he decided to rip ‘the Band-Aid off’ by calling his mother after the FX series Pose finished filming.
“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’,” Porter shared.
“And it’s all true. It’s my own shame. Years of trauma makes a human being skittish.
“But the truth shall set you free. I feel my heart releasing.”
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