UNPROTECTED: A MEMOIR BY BILLY PORTER
EVEN if you do not know who Billy Porter is, you probably have seen him somewhere and just didn’t know it’s him. Recently he stole the show and was the talk of the town for months after wearing a gown to the Oscars in 2019. Unprotected is a book full of its author’s singular voice, as he recounts with unusual frankness his journey from precocious gay Black boy in a poor, abusive household in Pittsburgh to two award-winning roles in middle age that made him a star: Lola the boot-making drag queen in ‘Kinky Boots’ on Broadway, and Pray Tell the ballroom MC in ‘Pose’ on FX. His journey, he makes clear, did not follow a straight path... in any way. If others have dismissed him because of his too-muchness, he has struggled to see these traits as precisely what makes him special. In probably the most insightful paragraph in the book, he writes at length about how choreographer Bob Fosse’s art spoke directly to him because “the most iconic aspects of his work were inspired by his imperfections. Because he was losing his hair, hats became an integral part of his pageantry. His shoulders were rounded, giving rise to his signature slouch.”
I was intoxicated by the way he had spun his ‘flaws’ into stylistic gold. It felt like a message for me that my own ‘flaws’ and vulnerabilities might actually be arrows pointing straight to the heart of my power as a performer, and – dare I say – my artistry.” His mother was disabled at birth because of a botched delivery, married the first man who showed any interest, although he only did so, Porter tells us, to win a bet that he could seduce the ‘church cripple’. The marriage lasted just until a year after Billy’s birth, when she fled his abuse by moving back home to the oppressively religious household she had married him to escape. She tried to escape again by remarrying. Billy’s stepfather treated him well — teaching him how to fend off the schoolyard bullies who had made his life hell, navigate public transit, use the tools in a toolbox, and other father-son pursuits — until he started molesting him at age seven.
His focus on art started at an early age. He was recognised as an extraordinary singer from the age of five, when he began soloing in church. His singing was his ‘superpower’, his ‘weapon’ and his “saviour,” but he pushed to learn how to dance and act from middle school on, finagling his way into an arts high school, then earning a theatre scholarship to Carnegie Mellon University. His professional accomplishments began piling up, but none seemed (then or now) to satisfy him. If he sounds hard on himself, he’s even harder on some other people, using his memoir to settle some scores and call people out. A teacher at Carnegie Mellon advised him to take up smoking, because his voice was ‘too high for the American stage’ – he does have a very high singing voice for a man (officially a ‘tenorino’) but one could take her comment as a euphemism for ‘too queer’. He outright calls Jerome Robbins a racist, says that Spike Lee accused him of not being black enough, and calls out producer Daryl Roth (the producer of ‘Kinky Boots’!) at some length for having attended Donald Trump’s inauguration, in the process also attacking her son Jordan Roth (president of Jujamcyn Theatre) — as well as Jordan Roth’s husband — apparently for not speaking out against his mother. It is not as easy to find a truth-to-power motivation behind several anecdotes he tells of his firing agents and managers on the spot, their offence apparently being that they showed him insufficient deference. When Billy Porter writes things like “My art is my calling, my purpose, dare I say my ministry,” he sounds like Pray Tell, because Pray Tell sounds like Billy Porter. One of the greatest memoirs one could lay their hands on.