Billy Porter has taken his life and made it art at Joe’s Pub.
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Friday, February 25, 2005
While he’s not a household name — yet — you may recognized multitalented Billy Porter — either “Miss Saigon,” “Five Guys Named Moe,” or “Smokey Joe’s Café” on Broadway; or as Taylor in the hit film “The Broken Hearts Club”; or his single “Love Is On the Way,” featured in “The First Wives Club.”
In his new show “Ghetto Superstar: The Man that I Am,” now in previews for a February 28 opening at Joe’s Pub, Porter tells of his struggles in making it in showbiz while making peace with his past. Porter has written the book and most of the music himself. He’s clearly a man with much on his mind.
He discusses the challenges of being openly gay and an African American in the entertainment industry. Porter sings in the opening number of being a “Black Broadway Bitch,” and he describes this as his defiant response to the last 20 years of being told by people in the business what he can and cannot be.
“It’s about being part of the Broadway community but not feeling like who I am or what I do is represented in an interesting way,” he says. “And then going into the music business and being told that my love of the theater was inappropriate for that genre.”
He notes that it’s also about “coming from the church where they just don’t understand theater at all, even though the Pentecostal church is theater at its highest and most dramatic.”
Porter says he set out to write the show to find something that was true and unapologetic. He says that many label performers and put them in boxes. “But I’m sick of them giving me labels that I don’t agree with,” he adds. “So here’s the label that I’m going to give myself.”
“I’ve been told my whole life that who I am is something that can’t coexist: gay, black, from the Pentecostal church, and in the theater,” he says. “All of those things came into play as I was coming up through my career and trying to find a place to fit in.”
With “Ghetto Superstar,” Porter says he’s creating his own box: “They don’t call me for Brian Stokes Mitchell’s parts on Broadway. And they’re not calling me to be the replacement for Leo Bloom in The Producers. But they should be, because I could be doing it. So I either complain or I use my frustration to create something that’s positive.”
He acknowledges that he’s not the first performer to face such a challenge. He cites Whoopi Goldberg: “Before her, there was no ‘Whoopi Goldberg’ type — and now there is.”
He believes many people who are struggling could benefit from his story. “People need to understand that you can go through things that are horrible in your life and come out on the other side better for it.” More importantly, he adds that people need to embrace the totality of who they are. “It’s the only thing that leads to total peace.”
Case in point, towards the end of the show Porter dons a pair of bright red stiletto heels. He says that for many years, he was considered an actor who could play only gay roles or drag queens. He found that limiting, so he stopped playing those roles.
“But that was all about other people labels on me,” he says. It’s only when he embraced the totality of who he is that he was able to recognize the value of both his feminine and masculine sides.
“I’m really fierce in the heels,” Porter explains, “and I can wear them whenever I want and that doesn’t make me any less of a man.” Yet it wasn’t until he took that journey that he was able to find his way to what he calls his “uber-masculinity.” It wasn’t until he embraced his feminine side that he was able to take on a role in “Topdog/Underdog.”
Porter says this show marks a new beginning. “Everything that has happened before now has made me who I am. And now I can actually live my life for real, in truth now. And it’s really exciting.”
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