Unprotected Quotes

“If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“You are the only one who’s going to be able to hold yourself to a higher standard, because no one around you will know the difference.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“I am in your midst, without apology. I’m here to stay. I’m here as I am. And if you have a problem with that—fuck you!”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“Fifteen minutes early is on time, on time is late, and late is unacceptable.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“Sometimes folks need preaching. Sometimes the message of love, inclusion, and equality needs to be direct and clear.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“Congressman Lewis, I know the Oscars may not be the time or place for politics, but I must ask you, for those of us who are feeling activist, resistance fatigue—what would you say to us to encourage forward momentum and engagement?” Congressman Lewis’s eyes lit up, he gave me that knowing look, and he clicked right in. “We can neva give up! We can neva give in! We must resist! We must fight for what’s right. Equality for all!” .”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“every war ever fought has essentially been boiled down to “my God is better than yours.” It’s just not right.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“There’s a lesson in every triumph, but more importantly, in every disappointment. Find the lesson.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“But every day I remind myself that nothing matters more than extending the legacy of the angels in my life. It’s my devout conviction that if I’m not enabling and encouraging the underprivileged and the vulnerable, then I haven’t justified their confidence in me, and I haven’t done sufficient justice to their gifts.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“It’s time to remind the world who we are. So don’t be scared. Don’t be terrified. Don’t wait till the battle is over; fight now. Because love always wins.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“this Bible situation is problematic. It’s been weaponized by the oppressor to prop up hypocrisy and to justify hate. Hate the sin but not the sinner? Y’all can miss me wit dat!”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“Your service is leaning into your truth, your queerness, your authenticity. Yeah, that thing you been told needed to be fixed. Yeah, the thing everyone told you would be your lifelong liability. You are enough, just as you are.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“It's easy to be who you are when what you are is what's popular.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“The knowledge of perception is key to success. One must know how one is being perceived from the outside.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“What is family? Most would say family means a group of people closely related by blood or marriage as parents, children, uncles, aunts, and cousins. This is family of the biological kind. By the same token I’ve learned in my life experience that family can also be of the chosen kind. As queer people we very often find that our chosen families are the ones who love us unconditionally and pick up the slack in support of our personal truths and humanity when our biological family members don’t have the tools.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“All I wanted was to protect her from the mean people who made fun of how she walked. She couldn't help walking the way she did, it wasn't her fault. She was born that way. And mommy always said that God didn't make mistakes, so she was born just as she was supposed to be. Why didn't other people know that? Why wouldn't they leave her alone?”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“Actually, the entire system is bullshit. It’s not broken. It’s working exactly how it was set up and intended to work. To keep us Negroes in our place! James Baldwin wrote, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“But this God thing. Yet again I feel abandoned by the concept. Always have. I feel used. God is used as a weapon to control. I don’t like what humans have done to the idea of God. Maybe there is no God. Maybe it’s just us humans down here fucking everything up, and when the universe is tired of the evolution experiment the world will simply implode.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“The show-stopping red velvet and pink tulle look also rocked an embroidered uterus motif that I selected to support women’s reproductive rights amid the current political upheaval about the issue.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“I don’t even have the words to describe how it feels. What it feels like to be loved. To have support for your love. To receive it like never before. I’ve never felt it. I didn’t know this is what it’s like.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“Do you want to be a star, or do you want to be an artist? Being a star for fame’s sake is ego-driven. Being an artist requires stripping away ego and grounding oneself in service.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“Elie Wiesel wrote: “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“Where are you? The silence from you all in one of America's darkest moments of need is deafening. Silence is violence. Silence equals death.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“In his Letter from Birmingham Jail Martin Luther King Jr. wrote: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“It's time to play the game that we're in and stop taking a bag of popcorn to a gun fight.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“The Bible had become the breaking point, and I was no longer interested in believing in something that didn’t believe in me.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“The thing I hate the most in this life is injustice. Dr King said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“My past had cured me of any desire to receive validation or care from those so-called saints of my congregation or any man-made religiosity.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“Because as I was getting older my relationship to the church and the people who populated the church was strained and phony at best. And I wasn’t good at hiding my disdain. They saw me as an abomination. I experienced them as hypocrites. And there was no love lost at either end. My mother observed this and was worried about me. I love her for that. Church folk can be the worst. Church folk can be petty and mean. They can make a person feel worthless, empty and alone, all in Jesus name. They were always shady to my mother. Lots of folks treated that she was stupid because of her disability. She was othered in the only space she felt remotely safe. The only space she knew.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir

“I actually enjoyed the unspoken exile. I count myself as one of the lucky ones, one of the ones who broke free from what very often can be a life’s worth of debilitating stagnation. I’ve seen it. I’ve felt it happening to me - the Christian othering, the soul salvation bullies, the shame that keeps one bound up in a prison of their own mind for a lifetime. The hypocrisy of church folk was dangerous and deadly to me and I could see that fact plain as day. Mommy couldn’t. She was caught up in the spell. She had nothing else. It was all she’d ever known. ‘You gotta believe in something or you’ll fall for anything,’ she would say.”
― Billy Porter, Unprotected: A Memoir