Michael Kearns, pioneering openly gay actor and AIDS activist, dies at 76

Michael Kearns, one of the first openly gay actors in Hollywood and a fierce activist during the height of the AIDS epidemic, has died at the age of 76.

Kearns died on Monday evening. His friend, the filmmaker and professor Roland Palencia, confirmed his death, noting that Kearns had been in and out of emergency rooms over the past few months after feeling unwell.

His death came just days before he was due to return to the stage. He had been scheduled to perform selections from Jerker—the controversial 1986 play he famously directed—at Los Angeles's Celebration Theatre on Sunday to mark National Coming Out Day.

Coming out in the mid-1970s was a radical and dangerous move for an actor. Traditional industry wisdom held that a known gay man could never be cast in heterosexual roles. But Kearns refused to hide. "There was no way I was going to alter my offstage behaviour to please anyone," he later recalled.

He built a steady career anyway, appearing in television shows like The Waltons, Cheers, Murder, She Wrote, and Beverly Hills, 90210, as well as films including Brian De Palma's thriller Body Double.

In 1991, Kearns made history again. A week after the actor Brad Davis died of AIDS—having kept his illness secret to protect his career—Kearns went on NBC's A Closer Look and Entertainment Tonight to announce that he was HIV positive. He became the first openly gay, HIV-positive actor to do so on American television, later saying he wanted to banish the shame and fear surrounding the virus.

Kearns channelled his grief and anger into his art. In the mid-1980s, he co-founded Artists Confronting AIDS. He wrote and performed acclaimed solo shows, including Intimacies and More Intimacies, portraying a dozen different characters living with HIV and AIDS.

As a director, he made a major impact with the 1986 premiere of Jerker, Robert Chesley's play about two gay men falling in love over a phone-sex line. When a local radio station broadcast excerpts, a complaint from an evangelical minister triggered an FCC warning. Kearns fiercely opposed the censorship, arguing that a heterosexual equivalent would never have faced the same backlash.

Born on 8 January 1950 in St. Louis, Kearns found his calling early. He discovered acting at age eight, which eventually led him to study at the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago.

Beyond his acting, Kearns was an author of several acting books, a teacher, and a father. Following the death of his husband, Philip Juwig, in 1992, Kearns adopted a daughter, Tia Katherine Kearns, in 1995.

He spent his later years fostering new voices, serving as artistic director of the spoken word collective QueerWise, which he founded in the early 2010s, and working with Los Angeles communities to help them tell their own stories.

Kearns is survived by his daughter.