Antoni Porowski says that conversations around sexual health don’t have to be awkward

By Dan Heching, CNN

(CNN) — Many years before he became the resident foodie and one fifth of the makeover dream team on “Queer Eye,” Antoni Porowski already had no problem having important and frank conversations.

“I learned about STIs probably before I hit puberty,” he told CNN in a recent interview.

When Porowski later called out his physician father for broaching the subject of sexually transmitted infections when he was quite young, his dad’s response was, “Well you know what, you had to know and you were going to find out at some point anyway.”

Porowski – whose mother, sister and grandfather also have medical backgrounds – grew up around science and having conversations about health, sexual and otherwise, and he says he feels privileged to have had that access to helpful information early on. It’s one of the reasons he’s partnering with pharmaceutical company Gilead to promote HIV prevention and having open discussions about sexual health.

“The more you talk about it, anything that’s uncomfortable, the less precious it becomes. It loses its power,” Porowski said.

Porowski’s involvement in the campaign comes at a time of unprecedented cutbacks on DEI programs, which among many other things contain efforts designed to help people realize and achieve sexual wellness through access to pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PrEP, drugs that prevents HIV infections, which are produced by companies including Gilead) and other information. Analysis of federal data by the New York Times in May found that Donald Trump’s administration had scrapped more than $800 million worth of research into the health of LGBTQ+ people.

“With all of these unfortunate initiatives, I think it pushes us more towards stigmatization, because it helps fuel the taboo and negative understandings and perceptions of a lot of things,” Porowski said.

“Often as we’re seeing in culture right now and in politics, the things that a lot of certain people are afraid of, they end up turning (it) into anger, and it then flips to taking away or minimizing rights because they just don’t get it,” he added.

For Porwoski, the current political landscape and its challenges present an opportunity to “keep talking about this even more than we did.”

“Because as much progress as we’ve made – progress isn’t linear, as I’m learning with a lot of things, especially politically,” he said. “The key for anything that is misunderstood or misperceived, I think it’s an opportunity to have a conversation about it.”

Part of his understanding comes from his involvement on “Queer Eye,” which will soon premiere its tenth and final season. The show has long focused on the ongoing conversations between queer and non-queer people, and their efforts to understand one another.

“People who we’ve met on the show who definitely leaned more on the conservative side knew us as concepts, before meeting us,” he said. “They have their ideas of what it’s like to be queer and that was it.”

The way past that, he said, was to help them “realize that we’re someone’s kid.”

To “get to know the person as an individual and not a concept” is “a good blanket statement for any type of intolerance or lack of embracing of diversity in our culture,” Porowski said.

Making connections and having meaningful conversations is ultimately what Porowski comes back to, for both learning the value of tolerance and arming oneself with information for better health by having those meaningful conversations with a doctor.

“Talk to a physician, ask the questions, that’s literally what they’re there for,” he said.

Porowski says that while he had the “great gift of being raised around science and trusting it,” he knows there are others who weren’t and don’t.

He urges those people “who sit on the other end of the spectrum, of not trusting it” to “just shut up and put your curiosity hat on and ask questions.”

“Ask things that you’re genuinely curious about, so that you can educate yourself,” he said. “I think we all have a responsibility to educate ourselves.”

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