If you were a gay teen in the early 2000s then you probably remember Danny Roberts, the out housemate on The Real World: New Orleans. Now in an exclusive new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Roberts has come out as HIV positive.

"I spent so long battling and beating myself up for my own misconceptions and bigotry,” he says. “It is difficult to admit the negative feelings you had about a set of people and state of being based on made-up stories.”

Roberts reveals he found out he was HIV positive in 2011, when he went to his doctor after passing out and waking up in a pool of blood one weekend.

"My first reaction was shock. Then I was angry, then lots of denial... Those early years were very difficult and very lonely," he recalls. "You don’t know whom to turn to have conversation and people don’t know what to say. It’s not something that people have experience with," he says. "There’s also the potential likelihood of massive judgments about what behaviors led to this and what kind of people this happens to."

The reality star-turned-digital design recruiter said he has been undetectable since his diagnosis, and even though he has been hopeful with medical advancements in recent years, he admits that living with HIV is like "having a crappy old cell phone with a huge app eating your energy."

Roberts recently moved to New York City with his 2 1/2-year-old girl adopted daughter, and even though he was in The Real World house almost 20 years ago, he is still close with one of the costars, Kelley Limp, who went onto marry Party of Five star Scott Wolf.

“She’s my life sister,” Roberts tells EW. “She was one of the first people I turned to and talked to. She has been strong and helped me through this.”

Roberts explains how he had "so many negative feelings" about coming to terms with being HIV positive. “I’ve been on such a journey to overcome that. In a way, this has really been like my second coming out.”