Billy Porter reveals he tested positive for HIV in 2007: I've been using Pose's Pray Tell as my proxy

The Hollywood Reporter

The Pose star tells The Hollywood Reporter he kept his HIV-positive test secret because he feared marginalization and retaliation in an industry that hasn’t always been kind to him. Porter reveals that he used his HIV-positive Pose character Pray Tell as his proxy, without telling anybody involved in the FX series. “I was able to say everything that I wanted to say through a surrogate,” he says. "For a long time, everybody who needed to know, knew — except for my mother," he adds. "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. But quarantine has taught me a lot. Everybody was required to sit down and shut the f*ck up."