Billy Porter may have been the recipient of this year’s Achievement Award at the 2022 Outfest, but it was the highest court in the land and some republicans that was called out on Thursday night.
During his acceptance speech, the Pose star took the time out to express his grievances with the Supreme Court, succinctly saying “Fuck SCOTUS!” He also had some choice words for the Republicans that are currently testifying in the Jan. 6 hearings: “None of you Republicans who are coming forward in these hearings right now are heroes. You are not heroes. Fuck y’all, too!”
Porter then turned his attention to “left-leaning voters,” as noted by Variety, and said that they had gotten “too comfortable” during Obama’s time in office and implored them to change their messaging and get their vigilance back.
“Our messaging has to change,” he said in his speech at the Orpheum Theater in LA. “We thought we won something–the Democrats, the progressives–we got civil rights, we got Roe v. Wade, we got marriage equality, all the rest. We got a Black president and then we all sat on our asses and ate Bon Bons for eight years and then the unthinkable happened.”
He continued:
“We lost our vigilance. It’s time for us to take that shit back. Our 24-hour news cycle has forgotten to illuminate that the reason the pushback is so severe in this moment is because the change has already happened. We’re already here. Look at me! The change is already happening and we ain’t going back,” Porter said, adding, “We are at war to save the soul of humanity. Thoughts and prayers don’t mean shit. They don’t. Hate is an action. Love is an action. Peace is an action. So we have to choose love. We have to choose hope. We have to choose joy.”
As previously reported by The Root, earlier this week, Porter also spoke out on the injustices Black folks face, specifically at the hands of police in the season premiere episode of NBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? After discovering that his own grandfather was murdered by a white police officer back in 1923, he reflected: “The thing I hate the most on the planet is injustice. How do we continually take in this information, continually take in this trauma, continually live through this, and still show up for our lives? Violence against people of color is wholly American and reading this really sheds light on why it was never spoken about.”