Billy Porter on being a queer black man in the music industry, the actor's strike and Trump's America
Ways to Change the World with Krishnan Guru-Murthy
Channel 4 News
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 1 December 2023
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Billy Porter started singing in church when he was about five years old, and growing up saw performance as a lifeline out of the trauma and rejection he experienced as a Black gay man.
The multi-hyphenate star won a Grammy and a few Tonys since his breakout role on Broadway with 2013's Kinky Boots, and was the first openly gay black man to win a lead acting Emmy for his role in the drama series Pose in 2019. Now Porter is returning to mainstream music with his fifth studio album, Black Mona Lisa, which he hopes will continue to craft an empowering legacy for the queer youth of colour.
Today on Ways to Change the World, he tells Krishnan Guru-Murthy about the challenges he faced due to homophobia in the music industry in the '90s, the harsh reality of being an actor in the golden age of streaming and what success means to him.
Produced by Silvia Maresca.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and |
| 0:02.0 | Welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Christian Guru Murphy and this is the podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people |
| 0:07.0 | about the big ideas in their lives and the events that have helped shape them. |
| 0:11.0 | My guest this week is the award-winning actor and singer Billy |
| 0:16.0 | Porter who has a new album out called Black Mona Lisa. Thank you very much for |
| 0:20.2 | joining us. Thank you for having me. |
| 0:24.0 | So let's start with the album. |
| 0:25.6 | Yes, please. |
| 0:26.6 | Why Black Mona Lisa? |
| 0:28.2 | So we were sitting around and Black Mona Lisa came, sort of fell out of this guy. I don't even remember where it came from, but it was like 30 seconds of silence. And then like 20 minutes later the song wrote itself. And what was really interesting about it is that it was |
| 0:46.9 | after the song was written that the meaning of it sort of landed for me. And that is that the actual Mona Lisa is |
| 0:59.4 | classic, relevant, past, present, future, always. |
| 1:05.0 | That's what I want my legacy to be. |
| 1:08.0 | So that's where it's from, that's what it's about. And the artwork is, you know, about me |
| 1:17.6 | busting out of the frame. You know, if you see it, it's like I'm I can't be confined by the frame by the picture frame by the artwork frame I got a I got a bust out of it |
| 1:29.7 | What is the frame in your life because you know you've often talked in those terms about busting out |
| 1:35.0 | of the confines of convention of society, of sexual norms |
| 1:40.0 | of identifying as queer, all of those things. |
| 1:43.0 | So what is the frame into which you were born? |
| 1:46.9 | I was born a black man in America. |
| 1:49.6 | I was born a black gay man in this world. That's a big fat no for a lot of people in a lot of |
| 1:58.8 | spaces most of the time and I'm 54 years old. |
... |
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