That’s what I was waiting for, if I’m being honest. So I’d made a pact with myself that I would let her die before I told her. I was the statistic that everybody said I would be. My mother had been through so much already, so much persecution by her religious community because of my queerness, that I just didn’t want her to have to live through their “I told you so’s.” I didn’t want to put her through that. And my shame was really connected to my relationship with my mother and my ex-relationship with the church. It’s time to grow up and move on because shame is destructive - and if not dealt with, it can destroy everything in its path. Now I’m trying to have a family now it’s not just me. I’m the vessel, and emotionally that was sufficient - until it wasn’t. I survived so that I could tell the story. I was just happy that somebody was finally taking me seriously as an actor. My compartmentalizing and disassociation muscles are very, very strong, so I had no idea I was being traumatized or triggered. And the brilliance of Pray Tell and this opportunity was that I was able to say everything that I wanted to say through a surrogate. An opportunity to work through the shame and where I have gotten to in this moment. To be given the gift of practicing forgiveness in a narrative eight times a week for three years - eight times a week, I was allowing myself to forgive my father onstage and both of them in the ground. When I got Kinky Boots, the trajectory for my character, Lola, was about forgiving her father. And as an artist, I’m grateful to have been given opportunities to work through my shit. My trauma served me, my story has served me, in terms of forward motion. And it was my engine for a very long time. There has never been a moment that I’ve not been in trauma, which is what I’ve discovered this last year. That’s the amazing part of the developments.” Courtesy of Subject “We are in a mixed-status relationship,” Porter says, referring to his husband, Adam Smith. I started peeling back all these layers: having been sent to a psychologist at age 5 because I came out of the womb a big old queen being sexually abused by my stepfather from the time I was 7 to the time I was 12 coming out at 16 in the middle of the AIDS crisis. But in the last year, I started real trauma therapy to begin the process of healing. I started when I was 25, and I’ve been going on and off for years.
Now, I’ve been in therapy for a long time. COVID created a safe space for me to stop and reflect and deal with the trauma in my life. I’d never been given the luxury to even think about self-care or balance on any level before.
I have to protect myself, and I have the means to. My husband and I rented a house on Long Island because I have a preexisting condition and I can’t be in the middle of it. Everybody was required to sit down and shut the fuck up. So I tried to think about it as little as I could. It would just be another way for people to discriminate against me in an already discriminatory profession. I was trying to have a life and a career, and I wasn’t certain I could if the wrong people knew. Photographed By Lia Clay Millerįor a long time, everybody who needed to know, knew - except for my mother. Arturo Obegero suit, Lorraine Schwartz bracelet and rings.