Pose actor Billy Porter has revealed he has been living with HIV for the past 14 years.
The US star was diagnosed in 2007 but said he had since "lived with that shame in silence".
Making it public would also have been "another way for people to discriminate against me in an already discriminatory profession", he explained.
But speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, he said: "There's no more stigma - let's be done with that. It's time."
Porter made his name on Broadway, winning a Tony Award for his role in the musical Kinky Boots in 2013.
He won an Emmy in 2019 for playing Pray Tell, an MC on the 1980s New York ballroom scene, in Ryan Murphy's acclaimed TV drama Pose. He earned Golden Globes nominations for best TV drama actor in both 2019 and 2020.
"I was the generation that was supposed to know better, and it happened anyway," he said of contracting HIV.
"The shame of that time compounded with the shame that had already [accumulated] in my life silenced me, and I have lived with that shame in silence for 14 years. HIV-positive, where I come from, growing up in the Pentecostal church with a very religious family, is God's punishment."
He said he told "everybody who needed to know", explaining: "I was trying to have a life and a career, and I wasn't certain I could if the wrong people knew.
"It would just be another way for people to discriminate against me in an already discriminatory profession. So I tried to think about it as little as I could. I tried to block it out."