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Pose's Billy Porter Tells Kevin Hart 'F You' Over Homophobic Jokes

Pose's Billy Porter Tells Kevin Hart 'F You' Over Homophobic Jokes

Billy Porter and Kevin Hart

The Tony winner discussed the power of words and how he has a zero-tolerance policy on anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.

Responding to the dust-up over short-lived Oscar host Kevin Hart's past homophobic tweets and his reluctance to apologize for them, Pose star Billy Porter slammed Hart and comic D.L. Hughley (who defended Hart) in an interview with Consequence of Sound.

"I say to Kevin Hart, and I say to D.L. Hughley, I say to those people who think that they don't need to apologize for shit and dig their heels in their toxic masculinity: But you want your rights!" Porter said. "You want people to stop shooting your children in the back? But yet still, you turn around and oppress other people the same way you're being oppressed. Fuck that. Fuck you. We're done."

"That crosses a line," Porter continued. "Because that allows your fans to think that [you can] hit somebody because you don't like them. You don't like their sexuality, so I can bash you in the head. We're not doing that anymore. And that is what Pose challenges."

Shortly after it was announced that Hart would host the Academy Awards, homophobic tweets from 2011 surfaced in which he said he would physically abuse a son if he turned out to be gay. But rather than take the resurfacing of the tweets as an opportunity to apologize, Hart initially dug his heels in and blamed those who took umbrage with his anti-LGBTQ rhetoric for "looking for reasons to be negative."

"Yo if my son comes home & try's 2 play with my daughters doll house I'm going 2 break it over his head & say n my voice stop that's gay," was one of the tweets for which Hart initially refused to apologize. Eventually, he did apologize as he stepped down as the host of the Oscars.

Meanwhile, Porter also namechecked Hughley who defended Hart and later lashed out with vile language at Porter's Pose costar Indya Moore, who in a series of tweets explained why Hart's so-called jokes were unacceptable.

"Fuck em, if they can't take a joke. Well played Kevin Hart that is how it's done," Hughley said.

Eventually, Hughley got into Moore's mentions and lashed out at her when he didn't like her response to him.

"The psychological impact of a JOKE is detrimental not only to the mental health of the individual who is the comedic subject but also their physical safety," Moore wrote in response to Hughley. "Comedy is an excruciatingly poor justification for being a bigot."

"I make a living doing what love, put kids through college, paid for my homes, and travel the world, and still don't give a shit what a pussy like u thinks," Hughley wrote back.

"People think that words don't matter," Porter continued in his interview. "Because it's not about you having a joke. That's not what it's about. I've seen people and I've heard people who are not homophobic who do gay jokes. And you can tell that they're not homophobic."

"I think Monique, a long time ago, she did a joke about butt sex," Porter said. "It was a whole thing about butt sex and 'the gays,' you know. And the punchline was something like, Yeah, but don't knock it till you try it! ... But she's not a homophobic person. She's not saying, If I come home and my four-year-old son is playing with a baby doll house, I'm gonna break it over his head and tell him it's gay."

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