Michael Kearns, a trailblazing AIDS activist and author credited as the first out gay actor, has died. He was 76.
Filmmaker and professor Roland Palencia confirmed the actor’s death on social media, writing that Kearns had died Monday evening after feeling unwell and calling the paramedics on Sunday. Palencia said that the actor had been in and out of emergency rooms more than five times in the last few months.
“Michael Kearns was a friend, mentor, neighbor, and my movie buddy,” Palencia wrote. “For the past year, we watched an average of a movie a month. Our favorite theater was the Vista Theater in Los Feliz, with a larger-than-life screen and within walking distance of where we both lived. Our favorite film this year was ‘The History of Sound.’
“It is a strange feeling to know we will not see the living Michael again, who spoke in hyperbolic, superlative tones. For him, nothing in life was small enough; everything had magnified significance. He himself and his legacy are larger than life,” he continued. “I will miss him deeply. Our next movie was going to be ‘La Bola Negra,’ a film based on Federico García Lorca’s first openly gay play, the Spanish playwright [was] killed in 1936 by the fascist Francisco Franco army. Michael was our Los Angeles García Lorca.”
Born Jan. 8, 1950, and raised in St. Louis, Kearns felt odd from an early age.
“I couldn’t throw a ball particularly well. I didn’t excel in sports,” he told talk show host Sheila Kuehl during a 1998 appearance on “Get Used to It.”
“But one day I was put in the school play, and I excelled. Suddenly I realized I could entertain, and from that moment on it was just like this realization, ‘Oh my God, here is something that I can do, I have found it,’ and I was only 8 years old. From that moment on, to this very moment, I’ve never ever veered from that path.”
Kearns realized along the way that his path to stardom wouldn’t be so simple. He had initially been drawn to the theater as a means to escape his home life, and himself, but he ultimately found the craft inspired the opposite: “As I got into my 20s, coinciding with an awakening of other areas of my life — spiritual, sexuality — I found that the theater and being an actor was more of a way to truly connect with who I was as a person,” he told Kuehl.
Around this time, Kearns made his way to Chicago, where he studied acting at the original Goodman School of Drama, which became the Theatre School at DePaul University, and graduated in 1972. It was here that Kearns got his first taste of casting bias, and realized that he was facing a real dilemma: Did he want to be gay or did he want to become a commercially successful actor?
“In spite of the fact that most of the teachers were gay or lesbian, they had that Hollywood philosophy that if they knew you to be a homosexual, you were not as eligible to play heterosexuals,” he continued. “By that point I was out, out, out. I mean, there was no way I was going to alter my offstage behavior to please anyone.”
Kearns acted across film and television from the 1970s through the aughts, including roles in “Body Double,” “Nine Lives,” “Street Asylum” and “Beverly Hills, 90210.” During an era when it could be dangerous to be queer, the actor was out, and in 1991, he made television history when he shared that he was HIV positive on NBC’s “A Closer Look,” and the next day, “Entertainment Tonight.” The following year, he appeared on a segment of ABC’s dramedy series “Life Goes On” and played a character with HIV.
In 1975, Kearns used his acting chops to pull off a literary stunt in which he posed, both in nude photographs and in extensive interviews, as author Grant Tracy Saxon, a pen name for TV writer Thom Racina who penned “The Happy Hustler,” a faux memoir (it was actually fictionalized erotica) about a high-priced male sex worker. Years later, Kearns became an author himself and published five theater books including “T-Cells & Sympathy” and “Acting = Life,” which were nominated for Lambda Literary Awards.
The actor’s first major theater role in Los Angeles was in Tom Eyen’s comedy “The Dirtiest Show in Town” in 1972. Perhaps his most celebrated performance was playing the title role in Charles Ludlam’s “Camille” at Highways Performance Space in 1993. He also acted in James Carroll Pickett’s “Dream Man,” in 1985 and toured with the production internationally.
Kearns, who considered himself “a political creature as well as an actor,” also garnered acclaim for his solo theater works, which were inspired by the AIDS epidemic and his grief surrounding the too-frequent death of his friends. “Intimacies” and “More Intimacies,” in which he played a dozen diverse characters with AIDS, as well as solo pieces “Rock” and “Going In: Once Upon a Time in South Africa,” made Kearns feel that he had found new purpose and depth in his work.
“Somewhere in that time, I became an artist,” Kearns told The Times in 1994. “Whatever that pain, that loss, that tragedy was, I managed to spin it like an alchemist into something passionate. And it’s been increasingly so since.”
In 1992, he married his husband, Philip Juwig, who died the same year. Bereft, Kearns spent three years thinking, “What now?” and kept coming back to the same thing: He wanted to be a dad. In 1995 he adopted a baby girl, Tia Katherine Kearns, whom he named after his grandmother.
In 2017, he interviewed his daughter for the summer issue of Honeysuckle Magazine about her identity as a Black woman, her work as an artist and her unique upbringing. She said that she attended a progressive school and didn’t feel judged, noting, “they doted on my dad because he had a skill set that other dads didn’t; for school fundraisers; he could climb a ladder and decorate with panache.”
Later in the interview, she revealed that she had her dad’s passion for political activism.
“I think my political consciousness was formed early on,” she said. “I think it would have been impossible for me not to have an awareness of the world and political climate with a dad who is an openly gay actor and activist. Your openness and courage forced me to be honest with myself and the world I live in.”
Kearns gushed in a 2015 interview that his dream creative collaboration would be directing a project written by his daughter that explored race.
In the last couple of decades, the social justice crusader worked with Angelenos to develop their own voices through writing workshops. He also served as an artistic associate at the Skylight Theatre in Los Angeles, artist-in-residence at Housing Works, and artistic director of QueerWise, a Spoken Word collective he founded in 2012.
Kearns was widely recognized for his work, including the Robert Chesley Playwrighting Award (2005), honoring lifetime achievement in LGBTQ+ theater, and a COLA Fellowship (2005) from the city of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department to fund major new creative works. His acting career was highlighted by a Drama-Logue Award and a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award nomination for his lead role in “Camille.” Additionally, his national advocacy earned him the Victory Award (1999) from the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, alongside honors from the ACLU of Southern California (1987).
Kearns is survived by his daughter.
