• Janet Jackson is headed to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with Stevie Nicks, The Cure, Radiohead, Def Leppard, Roxy Music, and the Zombies. Nicks becomes the first woman to be inducted twice having been honored previously as part of Fleetwood Mac.
• Fox News host & Donald Trump superfan, Sean Hannity, was caught deleting past tweets that showed his connections to the president’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, just hours before Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison Wednesday.
• CBS News reports that Donald Trump is considering his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to be his third Chief of Staff.
• Tony Award winner and current Golden Globe nominee Billy Porter dropped a few holiday tracks on Soundcloud just in time for Christmas. The collection – “A Billy Porter Christmas” – can be found here.
Check out his smooth, soulful “Christmas Time Is Here” below.
• You could say things are going “swimmingly” down here in Puerto Vallarta. The views are very nice 🙂
• Speaking to OUT from the set of his new movie, Limited Partners, Billy Porter described the news of his Golden globe nomination for “Best Performance by an Actor In A Television Series – Drama” for Pose as “unbelievable, it’s out of body, it’s surreal, it’s crazy. I’ve been in this business for 30 years, I’m speechless, and I’m a man of many words, so to make me speechless is a big deal.”
• GOP Sen. Marco Rubio warns a presidential pardon for former campaign chair Paul Manafort would be a “terrible mistake” and could “trigger a debate about whether the pardon powers should be amended.”
GOP Sen. Marco Rubio says repeatedly that President Trump pardoning former campaign chairman Paul Manafort would be a “terrible mistake,” and that doing so could possibly “trigger a debate about whether the pardon powers should be amended.” https://t.co/H32i3GVklw#ThisWeekpic.twitter.com/Mvfwueb0XH
• Focus Features has acquired Michael Ausiello’s critically-acclaimed memoirSpoiler Alert: The Hero Dies with Dan Savage and David Marshall Grant to co-write the screenplay. The memoir is an emotional, often funny, account of Ausiello’s 14-year relationship that ends with the heart-wrenching death of his husband Kit, who succumbed to a rare form of neuroendocrine cancer in 2015. Jim Parsons is set to star.
• Vanity Fair: Donald Trump wonders if he should dump Vice President Mike Pence in 2020?
• Robyn has released the official music video for her hit, “Honey,” featuring dancers cast from a call sent out on her Twitter account.
The chosen dancers were flown to London for the shoot from all around the world.
According to press materials, “Robyn wanted the process of making the video to also embody her mantra of bringing people together and communicating in person…It is a testament to love, sensuality and the loose feeling during the after-hours of a great party.”
Tony Award-winner and current star of FX’s Pose and American Horror Story: Apocalypse, Billy Porter, has penned a frank and revealing personal story of childhood rape and sexual assault for OUT.com.
“Sharing my story with @outmagazine was both cathartic and empowering,” Porter wrote on Twitter. “Be warned, I held nothing back.”
As a disclaimer to the essay, Porter warns the reader that the piece contains “very explicit content,” and if that makes people uncomfortable his advice is to “move on now.”
“Because what we’re not gonna do is shame victims any longer,” he adds. “I have written this piece to continue the excavation of a healing for my soul, not the readers’ comfort level.”
And then, in unfiltered prose, Porter details how his stepfather began to sexually molest/assault him from the time he was 9-years-old.
Porter explains it began with his stepfather introducing him to soft porn and then graduating to more hardcore imagery in Hustler Magazine. His stepfather would ask which pictures he liked and Porter, in an effort to “endear” himself would say, “I like the ones with women and the men.”
A year later, things had escalated to his stepfather choking Porter while forcing him to perform oral sex.
With a reference to the recent Brett Kavanaugh hearings where Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was eventually mocked by the president for not having enough details for her memory to be considered credible, Porter writes:
Cut to a year later with my two hundred and fifty pound stepfather fucking my face with his uncut, coke-can-girthed c**k. (You were warned…)
Is that enough, y’all? Is that horrendous memory “credible” enough or is it too old to matter because I can’t remember the particulars of how I got to the bottom of a face-f*cking position, with the adult put in charge to raise me? Is the manic memory of being suffocated by my stepfather’s beer belly as he…as he…rammed…as I choked.
Am I being too graphic? Is my language to offensive so you can’t “hear” me? After 40-years of taking care of everyone else’s feeling surrounding my trauma, the only person I care about is taking care of myself! Sorry, not sorry.
‘I was born gay and he knew it,” Porter continued. “He knew I would respond favorably to the sex, because sex is pleasurable, sex feels good.”
And then, like many childhood victims of sexual assault, he questions himself. “Maybe it’s my fault,” he writes. “Maybe I asked for it.”
Porter would eventually escape by working at a summer theme park. It was there that the memory of “the affair,” as he had come to call it, would overwhelm him.
It was when his mother came to see him perform that he would tell her of the abuse.
“She believed me but she stayed with him,” writes the Pose star. “I was testing her, I guess? To see if anybody could take care of me. Would there being any consequences for the damage he had inflicted. Would there be any reckoning?”
Porter would spend the next year living in the family basement, filling his schedule with school, dance classes and performances while avoiding his stepfather.
But late one night, when Porter came home late after being at a church concert, his mother forced the two men into a confrontation. The stepfather came downstairs brandishing a leather belt.
“If you hit me… You better kill me,” Porter told his stepfather.
And then his mother demanded that the teenager “Tell him what you told me!” And the stepfather immediately went into denial.
“I didn’t do anything to that boy. I didn’t do anything… he… he didn’t already have coming to him! I told you there was something wrong with him. Something ain’t right with him in the head. I… I can’t believe this. I… That’s a lie. It’s a lie. He’s lying!”
Porter called him out, though. “Lying about what?”
Silence.
“See…? You just told on yourself.”
Soon after, Porter moved out and headed off to college at Carnegie-Mellon University. Even though the school was just minutes from home, he never went back.
The stepfather would die two years later due to a heart attack.
There would be no closure; no resolution; no healing.
Porter explains the #MeToo movement as well as the recent Brett Kavanaugh/Christine Blasey Ford showdown led him to share his story.
We’ve been forced to endure yet another public victim of these violent atrocities be shamed, mocked, laughed at, disbelieved and discredited while the monsters receive saintly status and are elevated to the highest court in the land with the power to legislate our lives as they see fit. No accountability. No consequences. Time’s up, Bitches! TIMES! UP!
In the end, it’s not a ‘woe-is-me’ story. This is a call to action.
Porter closes with a clarion call to use the one power we have in these trying times.
We have to stop in-fighting each other and band together to save our Democracy and earth’s humanity. Period! The End! Cause I know when the shit hits the fan they’re coming for my black faggoty loud mouth ass first.
So I’m gonna stand on the shoulders of all those who came before us, the folk who laid down their lives for the rights we seems to be so carelessly squandering – and keep screaming and fighting till my dying day! Who’s gonna join me? Pull it together people, it’s time to save the world!
VOTE, BITCHES!!! While we still can! It’s the only power we have!
To call the essay ‘powerful’ would be an incredible understatement.
Billy Porter in ‘Kinky Boots’ (image via Facebook)
After six Tony Awards (including Best Musical, Best Score and Best Choreography), a Drama Desk Award, a Grammy Award and many more honors, the hit Broadway musical Kinky Boots has announced the production will bring down the curtain for the last time April 9, 2019, notching 2,507 performances at the Al Hirschfeld Theater.
The musical, which tells the world “You change the world when you change your mind,” has been celebrated on the Great White Way, in London, across the United States and around the world.
“The ideal big Broadway experience!” – The New York Observer
“This smash-hit struts its stuff with sparkle, stilettos and heart! – Time Out New York
Based on the 2005 film and inspired by a true story, KINKY BOOTS follows Charlie Price (Tony nominee STARK SANDS), an aspiring young businessman who is forced to give up his dreams of living the London city life in order to save his late father’s family business in Northern England. When Charlie suddenly inherits his father’s bankrupt shoe factory, he finds unexpected inspiration in the form of Lola (BILLY PORTER) a fabulous entertainer in need of some sturdy stilettos. As Charlie and Lola work to turn the factory around, this unlikely pair finds that they have more in common than they ever dreamed possible… and discovers that when you change your mind about someone, you can change your whole world.
From the beginning of the show’s genesis, the creators’ message to audiences has been to learn to not only accept others for who they are, but to learn to love ourselves.
Original stars Billy Porter and Stark Sands (photo: Matthew Murphy)
The show guide for Kinky Boots, provided to school groups who attend the show, underscores the importance of children learning to “let me be me.”
If you look at all of the influential people in the world, many of the most spectacular people were probably also highly unique individuals when they were younger. Could you imagine Lady Gaga at your high school prom or havingMark Zuckerberg sit at your lunch table? What’s funny is that what is often considered cool in school actually becomes average in the real world, whereas those students, who don’t quite fit in, may turn out to be shining stars when they grow-up.
Playing the outrageous drag queen with a heart, out actor Billy Porter’s stunning performance as “Lola” won him a Tony Award, a Drama Desk Award and a Grammy.
Porter’s star continues to rise thanks to his breakout role in the acclaimed FX series Pose (which boasted the largest LGBTQ cast in the history of television), and will be featured the new season of American Horror Story: Apocalypse.
Porter has also used his elevated celebrity status to raise his voice on behalf of the LGBTQ community every chance he gets.
Billy Porter as “Lola” in Kinky Boots (photo: Matthew Murphy)
Throughout the show’s run, stars from all corners of the celebrity spectrum have lined up to don those sexy, thigh-high red boots.
The list of past/present stars includes out pansexual lead singer of Panic at the Disco! Brendon Urie, American Idol winner David Cook, out lead singer for Neon Trees Tyler Glenn, TV host Wayne Brady, YouTube star Todrick Hall, out pop star Jake Shears, Dancing with the Stars‘ Mark Ballas, and Grammy Award winner Kirstin Maldonado of Pentatonix.
“When you’re watching something that is so based in joy, you just can’t deny it,” gushed Glenn when he joined the Broadway cast.
“When we first set out to make this show, we never could have imagined the success it would have here on Broadway and around the world,” said Harvey Fierstein (book) and Cyndi Lauper (composer) in a joint statement. “We speak on behalf of the entire company when we say how grateful we are to the fans who have embraced our work across four continents, and counting!”
Cyndi Lauper became the first solo female Broadway composer to win a Tony thanks to Kinky Boots
“I’ll never forget the very first performance of this show, back in Chicago in the fall of 2012,” shared Tony Award winning director/choreographer Jerry Mitchell. “It was one of those magical nights in the theater, when the material connects with its audiences in exactly the way you hope for. It felt like a gift from the theater gods then, and it still does to this day.”
“In the years since, we have witnessed attitudes towards gender non-conformity start to change all across America in ways we couldn’t have begun to imagine in 2012,” Mitchell added. “It’s never easy saying farewell to a beloved production, but knowing that Kinky Boots is leaving a more accepting world than the one it was born into is hugely gratifying for everyone involved.”
• Tony Award winner Billy Porter, Emmy/Golden Globe-winner Mary-Louise Parker, and Emmy-winner Michael Emerson will head up a benefit reading of The Laramie Project on Monday, September 24, in NYC in honor of the 20th anniversary of the play that explored the murder of Matthew Shepard.
• Earlier this week, I reported that DC comics had launched a more “mature” version of Batman which included ‘full-frontal’ bat-nudity. Well, DC has now reversed course on that decision saying there will be no more private bat-junk on display in future issues.
• A lesbian couple was verbally attacked while staying the Clifton Mount Hotel by other guests. Their complaints to management resulted in the homophobic owner telling them, “Your not fit enough to stay in a hotel people like you should be put in a cage with the rest of the wild animals.” #HomophobiaLives
• A California stripper is facing serious jail time after stabbing his 50-year-old roommate. Geoffrey Tracy claims he was “creeped out” by the roommate “making moves on him.” Mind you, the muscle-bound Tracy was in NYC to dance at a strip club, so…
Tony Award winner and Pose star Billy Porter recently shared via his Instagram story this inspirational nugget:
“In September of 2002, I left Los Angeles vowing never to return until I was working on someone’s studio lot. I spent three years out here, as a black gay man trying to get work, and nobody was coming for me. Everybody told me I was worthless, and useless, and I would never work as a gay boy. I knew there was something better for me. I knew that I would be able to change the world if I stayed in it.
But I made that vow to myself. And child, I got off the plane and came to the 20th Century Fox lot to be on Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story. All I can say is dreams do come true. They may not come when you want them, but it’s all right on time. Keep on fighting, keep on showing up for your life. Keep on pushing. I’m a living witness that dreams come true. You change the world when you change your mind, and we all can make a difference in this world.”
Tony & Grammy Award winner Billy Porter calls out “white, cisgender, rich boys” in the LGBTQ community for closing their checkbooks once they got marriage equality in a new interview with Vulture.
Porter, who’s never been meek when it comes to issues of equality and civil rights, shares in a candid, new interview how working on the hit FX television series Pose brought back memories of living through the AIDS epidemic in 1980s New York City.
Billy says he was reminded how the transgender community became practically “invisible” during that time.
“For me, as a 48-year-old gay man, when I came out, we had to fight for our lives. Because the fight was so intense — and this is what this show has taught me — the T in LGBTQ was almost invisible. The fight was about something else. I equate it to the idea of the civil rights movement, and Martin Luther King Jr. and his relationship with Bayard Rustin. He was the gay man that taught him and set him up to be the civil rights leader that he was, and was erased from the conversation because that wasn’t the fight.”
The Pose actor goes on to describe witnessing how some left the battle field (taking their money with them) when the focus of LGBTQ rights shifted from marriage to transgender protections.
“There’s a lot of that in the gay culture, especially the cisgender, white, rich gay culture. I sat on the board of the Empire State Pride Agenda for six years, and that’s an organization that really was influential in lobbying and fighting for gay rights, during the AIDS crisis all the way up through marriage equality. When these white, cisgender, rich boys got marriage equality and the organization’s focus turned to transgender rights, those motherfuckers closed their checkbooks, and the organization of 25 years had to close.”
Billy summed up his purview of the situation:
“We need take all that energy and focus, and shift it on to those who are less than us. That’s how it works. Internal vigilance is the price of liberty. If we don’t take care of the least among us, it doesn’t matter how rich we are, it doesn’t matter how fabulous we are.”
This writer has known Billy Porter since the early 1990’s when he made his Broadway debut in the hit musical, Miss Saigon.
Billy Porter and I celebrate his birthday in the early 2000s
Over the years we’ve worked together in the theare, and I’ve interviewed him several times as a journalist. I can always count on a frank, candid, and totally unfiltered experience with Billy. #Yassss
When we chatted last year about his latest album, Billy Porter Presents: The Soul of Richard Rodgers, I was all prepared for music chat. But fresh off the 2016 election, Billy was primed for political chat explaining how the album was a political statement in and of itself.
And I loved it.
You can check out our chat from my podcast interview below.
Twenty years ago, in the aftermath of the horrific murder of 21-year-old college student Matthew Shepard outside Laramie, Wyoming, The Tectonic Theater Project traveled to the town to conduct interviews with the people of the town.
Those interviews evolved into The Laramie Project, which premiered in 2000 and has become one of the most performed contemporary plays in the world.
On September 24, 2018, the Matthew Shepard Foundation and Tectonic Theater Project will present a benefit reading of The Laramie Project to honor the progress made over the last two decades to erase hate.
As part of the company’s #EraseHate campaign, a stellar collection of stars came together to help create a new music video set to a new original song, “Love Is Love.”
Directed by Sue Kramer, the PSA features Matt Bomer, Billy Porter, Harvey Fierstein, Zachary Quinto, Michael Urie, Mary Louise Parker, Bridget Moynahan, Annaleigh Ashford and Michael Benjamin Washington.
Tony Award winner Billy Porter on ‘Live with Kelly & Ryan’
Billy Porter, Tony Award winner (Kinky Boots) and star of the new FX series Pose, recently dropped by Live with Kelly & Ryan to dish on the new series and how he ‘found’ show business.
It all has to do with The Wiz, Dreamgirls and thirsting for Jordache jeans.
Billy shares that theater first came into his life when his grandmother took him to see a national touring company of the Broadway musical, The Wiz, on his birthday in Pittsburgh, PA.
“I just fell in love,” says Porter. “And I thought, ‘Oh, I can actually do this for a living?’”
That revelation led to a job performing at a theme park the summer he turned 15 years-old. It was a grueling schedule of six shows a day, but Porter had his eyes on a prize.
“I stayed in a motel, I was fifteen, my mom had to give me permission to work cause I needed my Jordache jeans,” says the future Broadway star. “Oh, she said ‘You got champagne taste on a beer budget – you gonna have to find a job!’”
It wasn’t all glamour though.
“I had to wash out my costumes in the bathtub and hang them to drip dry for the next day,” shared Porter. “But what it did was it taught me discipline; it taught me how to show up for work every day because we work six days a week.”
“I was 15 years old working six days a week but I made that money honey – I got them jeans Jordache jeans.”
Pivoting to Pose, Kelly gushed, “This speaks to me – I almost feel like this TV show was written for me.”
Porter describes the series, about the LGBT ball culture in the go-go 1980s in New York City, as being about “family:”
“That culture is a space where this group of people, often rejected by their family, rejected by society, they’ve come together to create their own family unit. They take care of each other; the choice to live; the choice to choose life; the choice to celebrate life in the middle of the most horrific of tragedies is what this is about. It’s about empowerment, its about self-love, its about family, its about community. And it is the greatest job of my life.”
“We come to these balls which is, essentially, the family reunion, the family gathering. And there are ‘houses’ that are like ‘gay gangs’ and they come together in one space for these balls to walk categories; to walk the aspirational categories that they can’t quite actually achieve in life. And I’m sort of the godfather of the community.”
Billy Porter
And speaking of ‘walking,’ when Kelly asks for a lesson in vogueing Porter doesn’t hesitate to step to the floor for pose class.
“It’s posing on the rhythm,” he says. But there’s subtext, you see.
“It’s literally about making sure that you believe in yourself. So, the way you believe in yourself and how you present yourself is how you stand – so believe in yourself.”
Noting Ryan Seacrest’s rather frumpy body posture, Porter paused to query, “Do you believe in yourself?”
“Present yourself fully to the world,” says the actor as he reached for the sky as the music kicked in. “And rhythm, uh uh; and here, uh uh; and love the people!”
Its really a fab segment. Everyone in show biz is not necessarily great at being interviewed. The clock ticks quick in TV time and you have to be able to get your points across about the project you’re there to share, but also be open and accessible.
Porter is so comfortable in his skin and living life so loud its impossible to not succumb to his charms. Watch below.
Pose airs Sundays at 9PM on FX.
For more of the life and sass that is Billy Porter, click the play button below for my interview with the talented actor and singer about his latest album, and a few other topics in our no-holds-barred chat.
In the first episode of Ryan Murphy’s new groundbreaking series, POSE, Tony Award winner Billy Porter announces, “You ain’t dead yet.”
Porter, starring as the drag ball emcee Pray Tell, is giving some tough love to House mother Blanca Rodriguez (Mj Rodriguez). “There is nothing more tragic than a sad queen,” he adds.
The show, which centers on marginalized queer and brown people, signals early on there will be no resorting to sad-sack tropes about unhappy, suffering queers.
By centering negotiations of identity and oppression — as well as love and desire — between queer characters of color, the show allows for thoughtful exploration of intra-community hierarchies and conflicts. There are some limitations to this woke soap approach, but the show stands out in a television landscape dominated by straight stories “about race” and white stories “about queerness.” In telling a kind of intersectional fairy tale of queer brown lives, the show highlights just how limited the scope of most TV creators’ imaginations still is.
Pose’s story — as laid out in the first four episodes made available to critics — is ostensibly organized around a battle between two warring ball houses: the House of Abundance, mothered by Elektra Abundance (Dominique Jackson) and their upstart rivals, the House of Evangelista, led by former Abundance daughter Blanca Rodriguez (Mj Rodriguez). The show uses the House structures and the ball setting to dramatize the stories of the gay men and trans women of color who were — and are — the real-life protagonists of those settings, in service of Murphy’s usual goal of turning characters who might be written elsewhere as sidekicks into stars.
Ultimately, Pose is a queer fantasy, and a savvy take on the importance of fantasy for subjects marginalized through race, gender, and sexuality. “How lucky are we?” a house daughter says to Elektra at one point. “We create ourselves. Shit, we are the real dream girls.”
And in the glossy world of Pose, they finally are.
