Billy Porter chatted with Trevor Noah on The Daily Show this week about staying creative and politically engaged during the uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic.
“I am taking a break, I am learning what self-care is, I am learning what boundaries are, I am learning what balance is,” the Pose actor said. “I really do have a place in a space to breathe in this time, and I know how blessed I am to have that, so I’m using that. With that said, I do wake up every morning at 5:00 a.m. and write until 10, because I am working on a memoir, I’m working on a children’s picture book, I’m writing a pilot, I’m writing a musical — I’m a creative person and have been a freelance creative person for my whole life, so this is what I’ve done my whole life. I’ve always had to fill my own time up. So that’s not new. The terror that comes along in this time is the hard part.”
Porter also discussed how he has been campaigning for Democrats to get out the vote and get Donald Trump out of the White House. As a black man born during the tail end of the Civil Rights era, and as a gay man who came out during the AIDS crisis, Porter is no stranger to political engagement, and he believes that change is possible.
“I have seen it, I have lived through it,” he said. “And I think the challenge right now and the disconnect is the Wild Wild West that we’re in, of this online technology. We have to figure out how to bring in the tenets of how we were activists during the Civil Rights movement — whether it was the sit-ins, the bus boycotts, the bridge, whatever — and meld that together with what we can do with technology. That will be the new way that we can activate. But we haven’t gotten there yet. Behind my computer and Twittering is not activism, y’all. And I say that to myself, too.”
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