The day of our interview, Manhattan danced into her finest season — autumn, no question — and it was lovely enough to wear a cool-weather coat over warm-weather clothes. We were already running a few minutes behind when Billy Porter breezed into the Soho House New York lobby, draped in various neutral shades, earphones still attached to his smartphone, and all eyes moved toward him. If he noticed, he didn't stop to acknowledge the scrutiny beyond a beaming apologetic smile. He kissed both my cheeks, requested three minutes to finish his conversation, and blew back out onto the street. For weeks, I'd been reading, watching, and listening to any and every interview he'd ever done. Somewhere along that road, I'd gotten a distinct impression that anything could happen when you're meeting Billy Porter. I'd cleared my day for this interview and made an offering to the gods of adventure. Just in case.
Approximately three minutes after his exit, Porter reentered to greet me again, a family reunion in one glowing man. We moved through the crowd toward the elevators and up to the hotel restaurant to claim our brunch reservation. Our waiter walked us to a corner table where the constant hum of dining room chatter calmed a bit. After settling in, Porter explained that he'd just come from an appointment with designer Thom Browne that ran a little late. He smiled and thanked the waiter for his iced latte, then leaned in toward me. In a tone heavy with excitement and a hint of exhaustion, he went on.
"You know, when I get off airplanes now, sometimes TMZ is waiting in L.A. I'm going to be dripping in Thom Browne, walking through the airport." He sat back in his seat but kept talking with his hands. "I'm not hiding. Not going to be in a baseball hat. I'm not doing that. I'm going to be proud of what I fucking worked for. I'm here; I'm not hiding in anybody's corner. Yes, it's me; I'm not taking no pictures; God bless you."
My first engagement with the work of Billy Porter came via one of my closest friends, the founder of Broadway Black, Andrew Shade. We were both in that murky period between making art in college and figuring out what being an artist post-college even means when he'd encouraged me to check out the music for a show called Kinky Boots. Soon the soundtrack was in regular rotation on my daily playlist. In 2014, most of my friends who were also in their mid-20s were simultaneously mid-crisis. The fantasy of the lives we had assumed we'd been working toward collided with the reality of student loans, failed relationships, climbing rents, falling salaries, and being openly mocked for our failure to launch. Kinky Boots offered a safe space to a sad, effectively unempowered bitch just looking for a good time, and Billy Porter's voice offered the most useful kind of shelter. The strong kind.
For his performance as Lola in the show, Porter was awarded a Tony for best leading actor in a musical in 2013, and then a Grammy for the cast soundtrack in 2014. Since that time he's written a play, directed another play, and continued to act. In 2019, his turn as the character Pray Tell on the critically acclaimed ballroom-culture drama, Pose, from FX, earned him an Emmy for outstanding lead actor in a drama series. Soon audiences can catch him in a supporting role in the movie Like a Boss, starring Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrne. He told attendees at the New Yorker Festival last fall that he'll be playing the fairy godmother in a new live-action adaptation of Cinderella alongside Camila Cabello and Idina Menzel. At 50, he never seems to stop, and he has no plans to try.
With all of Porter's visibility these days, they all want pictures. Paparazzi, fashion photographers, and fans alike. Everyone wants to know what Billy Porter wore yesterday, and what he's going to wear tomorrow. Who could blame us? He wore a Randi Rahm embroidered and pink-lined cape on the Golden Globes red carpet so well that it almost feels more accurate to say he displayed it to us. Then he slid through the Academy Awards in a fitted tuxedo gown designed by Christian Siriano and was the picture of poise and regality. The gold catsuit he wore to the camp-themed Met Gala, designed by the Blonds, keeps me up at night. In a good way. Porter has said he wanted to be "walking art," and every red carpet is an opportunity to rise to that occasion. Since he's a reliable source of a Fashion Moment, I asked if he's always loved clothes this much, and with this clarity of vision. He took a moment to think.
"It was always an expression for me. I always wanted to do something different. I always wanted to express myself in my clothes differently. And I always had great taste. And expensive taste." He laughed to himself, a memory coming through the fog. "When I was 10, I could walk into a store for my Easter suit and scan the suits [he mimics pointing to one], and it would inevitably be the most expensive suite in the store." His family insisted he had "champagne taste on a beer budget" and informed him that he would have to get a job. A young Billy Porter accepted this wholly: "I understood they couldn't give me the shit I wanted."
As he understood it then, the only thing that could get him closer to what he wanted was being close to the people who already had it. And those people were most likely not like him. "I'm the kid who wanted to go to private school and couldn't get in because I wasn't smart enough to get the full scholarship. I could only get a partial one. I wanted to go to private school because that's where the white people went, and white people were successful. That's all I understood. I need to be with the white folks because they're successful. I need to align myself with the white people and the black people who understand that. And before I became artsy-fartsy bohemian in my style, around senior year, I wore a tie and a blazer to school every day and made public school my own private school." You could say he learned the value of a costume, and how it could serve him in the pursuit of his dreams, early on. It would be a long time before he learned the value of the person beneath the suit.
The path to learning his value was in no way smooth. "The hetero normative construct that masculinity is better silenced me for many years. It was like my masculinity was in question before I could even comprehend the thought. I was sent to a psychologist at five years old because I was a sissy and my family was afraid. I love them. They didn't know. It was a different time." Did he remember those meetings with the psychologist? He nodded. "I was in kindergarten, being taken to this white man in this big building to just talk to him for an hour every Wednesday after school." He stopped and took another sip of latte. "That's one of the first memories I have as a child, that something's wrong with you and you need to be fixed based on ‘You're not masculine enough.' I carried that with me for my whole life until, like, two and a half minutes ago. You know?"
Billy Porter wanted to sing. He wanted to be known as the "male Whitney Houston," but after recording music for a few years, he felt he had been rejected by the music industry due to a perceived lack of masculinity. "In the music business, in particular, I failed as somebody else. There's nothing worse. I didn't know that that's what I was doing. I wasn't intentionally doing that. But at the end of this really long, arduous journey inside of the '90s R&B music world, I ended up with nothing and had failed to do what they told me to do." The costume had gotten his foot through many doors, but it would not see him into the next phase of his dream. Porter sees his newfound mainstream fame as an opportunity to try again. Without the costume. "I have been blessed to have a second chance." A second chance to make art himself. All of himself.
"Flamboyance was a silencing mechanism for a long time with me. Flamboyant was code for ‘You're a faggot, and we don't want you.' Flamboyant was a word that was used to marginalize me and pigeonhole me and keep me in a box. You get in the room, you give them flamboyant, and then they come back to you with, ‘He's too flamboyant.' And that's when I started to want to murder people." One day, while watching an Oprah TV special featuring Maya Angelou and Iyanla Vanzant, he heard one of them mention the importance of shifting your mindset toward service to others. Then, one of the three claimed, the rest will work itself out. Something in that thought clicked for Porter. From across the table, his eyes grew wide with a mock realization: "It's inside of your authenticity. The very thing that everybody's telling you is wrong is exactly what you have to be."
Porter is not a "social media person," and he's hired a 29-year-old to help him manage his profiles on various platforms, but every once in a while he still reads the comments. Not all of them are supportive of his brand of authentic art, but he sees those kinds of critiques as proof of his power, and the power of us all when we make art from the center of ourselves. After his red-carpet photos from the 2019 Academy Awards flooded social media, some commenters referred to him as the singular cause of emasculation among black cishet men. Porter rolled his eyes and recalled his response. "I said, 'First of all if your masculinity is that weak, it should be attacked. Secondly, I didn't know I had that much power. But now that I do, you can expect I'll be wielding it every fucking chance I get. Every chance. It's a calling, it's a ministry, it's intentional. I know exactly what I'm here for. And that is power.'"
Power is what Porter believes far too many artists don't understand. "We are the arbiters. We're the ones that create change because it's creative in how we talk about it. We open hearts and minds in a different way. It's not didactic, it's not finger waving. Whether it's visual art, whether it's music, whether it's storytelling in a book, whether it's storytelling on film and screen — why do you think we're attacked first by tyrannical governments? Why do you think that that's the shit that's cut first? They know."
This could be why our government allowed the AIDS epidemic to run rampant through artistic communities in the '80s and '90s. This is also what fuels Porter to make art in an industry that still seems to overvalue everything but the authentic artist. "We lost an entire generation. But for me, I like to live in the present and in the positive. And what it's left inside of me is the fire to tell the story and to fill the void. That's why it's taken me so long. I was at the tail end of those artists. I was a young' un, learning from those people who died. And I've had all of this time to take" — he held his thumb and pointer finger less than half an inch apart — "the morsel of what I had learned and let it gestate, and grow, and grow, and gestate and grow, and gestate and grow. And it's our turn. It's time. I'm a part of the first generation of gay men, ever, who gets to be out loud and proud in the world. My generation is the first. Bitches are scared. And they should be."
By the time we finished brunch, Porter was ready to be off to the next event. We made plans to visit the Apple store (a new iPad for writing his memoir while traveling), then end our day at Native Ken Eyewear + Opticians for an appointment. Afterward, when he hugged me goodbye, he added, "Go love yourself today." I'm happy to report I took his advice. All of me.
Photographer: Ben Hassett. Stylist: Nicola Formichetti. Groomer: Melissa DeZarate. Makeup: Peter Philips. Nails: Naomi Yasuda. Production: Studio Lou
Read more cover stories on Allure:
- Lady Gaga: The Power of Makeup
- How Zendaya Balances Her Public Persona and Personal Identity
- Becoming Billy Porter
Now, watch the behind the scenes video of our cover star:
