Pose star, Broadway icon, fashion muse, and recording artist Billy Porter is holding nothing back on 2020 in a new piece published over at Daily Beast.
Writes Porter: “So let me be clear right up front: America is not now, nor have we ever been, better than this. We have tried and, for suspended moments in time, we have succeeded. But make no mistake: This moment we are in is pure and purposeful chaos. We are a country founded on the plunder and genocide of a people who were already occupying this land, and a country built on the backs of a people stolen from their homeland, shackled on ships, and brought here to be enslaved. For 250 years! Think about that for just one moment. Take that number in for real. I finally have: a quarter-millennium.”
Porter goes on to reflect on his lived experience as a Black gay man living in “this mess of America every day of my life” and on America’s unwillingness to truly reckon with it’s racist past.
“I don’t even know where to begin. I’m sick of talkin’ about it. I’m all cried out. I’m done being scared. I’m over being terrified. I’m simply filled with rage—a kind of rage that causes me to involuntarily tremble from the inside of my soul. This rage keeps me in a broken place where there is no peace. Ain’t never been no peace for me: a Black, gay man living in America.”
Further in the piece, Porter directs his ire at the entire Republican Party, saying they’ve “played Russian roulette with our lives and now the truth has been laid bare.”
“It’s become clear that to reign in absolute power has always been the plan, and the vessel to get there matters not,” writes Porter. “The GOP has been playing the long game and the rest of us got played.”
The full piece is well worth a read.
