PEOPLE Exclusive: How Billy Porter Overcame Childhood Abuse to Become a TV Trailblazer: 'My Voice Saved Me'

Billy Porter has survived a lot. But, also, the man has lived.

"At 52 years old, I am getting to the deepest parts of my truth," Porter tells PEOPLE exclusively in this week's issue. "I'm having a rebirth — on my own terms."

Raised in Pittsburgh by a mother with a disability and within a conservative Pentecostal community, Porter was always the Billy Porter we know today: a trailblazer. He's now, of course, an Emmy winner for the F/X drama Pose, a Tony winner for the Broadway musical Kinky Boots and an iconoclast on red carpets. But the world wasn't always ready for him.

Just as Porter has always said what he wanted to say — most recently in his new memoir, Unprotected — other folks have always said a lot about him. Growing up, he was too girly. At Carnegie Mellon, where he studied theater on a scholarship, he was told his voice "was too high for the American stage." Then on Broadway, "They said don't sing 'so R&B.' I was too Black, too ethnic, too gay, too much," he says. He still gets that on Twitter: Billy Porter is too much! He doesn't take the bait.