he came out as gay in the '70s and as hiv-positive on tv in 1991. he was booked for a coming out day show this sunday. somebody read his lines.

via Boy Culture, Karen Ocamb and Extra

Michael Kearns was booked for this Sunday. National Coming Out Day, at Celebration Theatre in Los Angeles, reading from a gay play he had first staged decades ago, alongside an old friend. It would have been a very Michael Kearns way to spend the day. He died on Monday night instead, at 76, according to Karen Ocamb, the Los Angeles LGBTQ journalist who knew him for decades, and Boy Culture.

His friend, the performance artist Tim Miller, announced it on Facebook on Tuesday. "I am mourning my beloved Michael Kearns," Miller wrote, per Boy Culture. "AIDS performer-warrior. Big brother. Friend since 1984. Truly one of a kind." No cause of death has been released.

out before out was a career option

Kearns was born in St. Louis in 1950, trained at drama school in Chicago, and was out as a gay man from the start, which Extra rightly calls "virtually unheard of at the time." His stage debut was Tom Eyen's The Dirtiest Show in Town in 1972.

Then came the bit that sounds made up. In 1975 he became "Grant Tracy Saxon," the supposed author of the bestseller The Happy Hustler, an answer to The Happy Hooker. The real author was Thom Racina, who did not want the spotlight; Kearns, per Boy Culture and Extra, was happy to do the talk shows and pose nude. He later titled his own memoir The Truth Is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler?, which is the best memoir title in our entire library.

He kept working through the eighties, including on Cheers and in Brian De Palma's Body Double.

what he said in 1991

In September 1991, the actor Brad Davis died of AIDS after hiding his diagnosis for years so he could keep getting cast. Days later Kearns told a national TV audience he was HIV-positive. "I felt that not one more HIV-infected actor or anyone else should die in shame," he told Ocamb for the Bay Area Reporter that month. "HIV is nothing to be ashamed of. For me to remain silent indicates shame or fear on some level."

Hollywood's reward was to cast him almost exclusively as dying men, and to make him look as bad as possible doing it. "They had to always make me look horrible. The ghastlier the better," he told the Los Angeles Blade in 2021, as quoted by Boy Culture. "They could not have an HIV character who looked normal, as I did when I arrived at the set. Finally, I had enough and refused to do that anymore." He played Cleve Jones in And the Band Played On.

the work he chose

He co-founded Artists Confronting AIDS with the playwright James Carroll Pickett. He wrote and performed solo shows, Intimacies and More Intimacies among them, and Ocamb writes that seeing Intimacies changed her life. The sixteenth, It Must Be Him: A Genderful Musical Memoir, ran in 2023. He taught acting for years. In the nineties, as a single HIV-positive gay man, he adopted a daughter, Katherine, who survives him.

Celebration Theatre, in its condolence note quoted by Ocamb, said he was best remembered there for his production of Robert Chesley's Jerker, the play he was meant to read from on Sunday. We hope somebody reads it anyway.