Billy Porter Reveals HIV Status & That His Memoir Is Coming: 'It Created a Space for Profound Healing for Me'

The category is: must read! On top of starring in the third and final season of Pose, playing the Fab G in the upcoming starry movie musical remake of Cinderella, making his directorial film debut and releasing new music this summer, Tony and Emmy winner Billy Porter is releasing a memoir. He revealed the news in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, in which he also shared that he was diagnosed as HIV-positive in 2007.

"For a long time, everybody who needed to know, knew—except for my mother. 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. So I tried to think about it as little as I could. I tried to block it out," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "But quarantine has taught me a lot."

In a recent interview with Broadway.com Editor-in-Chief Paul Wontorek for Broadway Profiles, Porter said that he wrote his memoir during the COVID-19 pandemic. "It created a space for profound healing for me, healing of old traumas that I didn't realize I had not healed," Porter said. "I lived through the AIDS crisis. The antiviral drugs came out in 1996, and true to American form, we act like it never happened at all. There's a whole generation of us that were never even given the opportunity to process what we went through. I was going to two to five funerals a week for over a decade, and I never processed that. We all got really good at compartmentalizing. We all got really good as disassociating in order to move forward and simply live." The final season of Pose, which stars Porter in his Emmy-winning role as Pray Tell, finds its characters facing the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

"This book really allowed for me to excavate the transformative power of healing," Porter continued. "I'm really grateful for that. I am a truly different human being because of it, and my hope is that we all come out of this different than when we went into it—better human beings than when we went into it."

The Hollywood Reporter also revealed that a Netflix documentary about Porter's life is being made. Watch this space for more info on Porter's many projects.