Billy Porter to receive award for LGBTQ advocacy work

The actor-singer is to be honored with the Lambda Legal Liberty Award at this year's National Liberty Awards.

May 25, 2023

Lambda Legal will honor Billy Porter and late LGBTQ activist Urvashi Vaid at its 2023 National Liberty Awards, Variety reports.

Porter will receive the Lambda Legal Liberty Award for his activism and support in the queer community during the ceremony, which will commemorate 50 years of legal advocacy for LGBTQ communities.

“In this moment, with states like Florida and others trying to silence and erase our communities, we must let our people, especially our young people, know what time it is: It’s time to fight back,” Porter in a statement Tuesday, Variety reports.

Celebratory Event For FOX's "Accused" - Arrivals — Billy Porter attends a celebratory event for FOX’s “Accused” on Jan. 30, 2023 at The Abbey on Jan. 30, 2023 in West Hollywood, California. (Photo by Monica Schipper/Getty Images)

In 2021, the actor and singer told The Hollywood Reporter that he was diagnosed with HIV in 2007, but he kept it a secret from the public for 14 years. During that time, few people knew about Porter’s diagnosis, not even his mother, theGrio previously reported.

“I was trying to have a life and a career, and I wasn’t certain I could if the wrong people knew,” the “Pose” star said at the time. “It would just be another way for people to discriminate against me in an already discriminatory profession. So I tried to think about it as little as I could. I tried to block it out.”

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Billy Porter announces 2023 ‘Black Mona Lisa Tour’

Currently, the Emmy and Tony winner, whom theGrio recently reported will portray novelist and essayist James Baldwin in a new biopic, is on his “first-ever career-spanning pop music concert tour: THE BLACK MONA LISA TOUR: VOLUME 1,” he wrote on Instagram. It is scheduled to wrap on June 3 in Connecticut.

Meanwhile, Porter is calling on the LGBTQIA+ community to “counteract the fear and discrimination with love, joy and living unapologetically as our ourselves,” he said, Variety reports.