Billy Porter complained that opportunities for LGBTQ creatives and people of color are drying up under Donald Trump's administration because of the end of 'performative wokeness.'
The Tony award-winning actor spoke with Al Sharpton on MS NOW about the 'No Kings' protests that erupted across the country on Saturday as he pointed out the changes in the entertainment industry.
'As a black, gay, out artist, I caught the wave of what we now know as performative wokeness,' Porter said.
'And I crashed through glass ceilings that were concrete. And I have noticed the opportunities slowly drying up for the work that I do.'
Porter, 56, cried that there is still an audience for shows about police and 'Midwest' Americans, but there is no interest in shows about minorities.
'The Midwest CBS shows, and the cop shows, all of that stuff still exists, but when it’s time to talk about heart, when it’s time to talk about connection and when it’s time to talk about people that don’t look like everybody else, those of us who are on the margins,' he said.
'There’s not a lot of that going on right now. There’s not a lot of that work going on right now.'
He went on to blame Trump for the shift, claiming that the president is attacking the arts.
He blamed the Trump administration's anti-woke agenda for causing opportunities for LGBTQ creatives and people of color to dry up.
'Authoritarian governments go after the arts first, because the arts have the power to reach inside of people and change the molecular structure from the inside out,' Porter said.
Porter joined other actors and artists, including Jane Fonda, to kick off the 'No Kings' protest weekend at a rally outside the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, on Friday.
After mostly ignoring the center during his first term, Trump has made it a focal point in his war against woke culture.
He ousted the Kennedy Center's previous leadership and replaced it with a hand-picked board of trustees who voted to rename the facility the Trump Kennedy Center, a change scholars and lawmakers say must be initiated by Congress.
LGBTQ-friendly programming at the center has also been scrapped amid the MAGA takeover of the facility, meant to be a memorial for Democratic President John F. Kennedy.
At Friday's rally, Fonda said the 'beloved citadel of the arts has become a symbol of what is happening.'
'If we don't fight back, the news we get will be increasingly fake. We won't be allowed to know what's really happening,' she said.
'Our children's academic curricula will be actually censored. Ticket costs for cultural events will go up, while the quality will go down. Books and films will be shallower, lacking nuance and complexity.'
The administration's alleged censorship was just one of many topics that drove millions to protest over the weekend.
Millions gathered coast to coast for coordinated demonstrations against the president, driven by anger over his immigration crackdown, rising costs and the ongoing war in Iran.
Bruce Springsteen led the lineup at the Minneapolis-St. Paul branch of the No Kings rallies.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson called them the product of 'leftist funding networks' with little real public support.
The 'only people who care about these Trump Derangement Therapy Sessions are the reporters who are paid to cover them,' Jackson said in a statement.