Actor, director and longtime LGBTQ rights activist Michael Kearns has died at 76, just days before he was scheduled to return to the Los Angeles stage for a performance tied to one of the most controversial productions of his career.
Kearns, whose acting credits included Body Double, Cheers, Beverly Hills, 90210 and The Waltons, died Monday, according to his longtime friend, journalist Karen Ocamb. A cause of death was not immediately announced.
His death came less than a week before Kearns was expected to appear at Celebration Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday, Oct. 11, which is National Coming Out Day.
He was scheduled to join longtime friend and colleague Joe Gill to revisit selections from Jerker, the groundbreaking 1986 play Kearns originally directed at Celebration Theatre during the height of the AIDS crisis.
Following news of his death, Celebration Theatre paid tribute to Kearns and his decades of work onstage and in the LGBTQ community.
The theater said it shared the community’s grief while honoring the enormous impact Kearns had on its mission and on the HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ rights movements.
For Kearns, activism and acting were intertwined for much of his career.
He came out as gay in the 1970s, when openly gay performers still faced serious professional consequences in Hollywood and the theater world.
Years later, Kearns took another major public step.
In 1991, he appeared on NBC and revealed that he was HIV-positive, becoming one of the entertainment industry’s more visible performers to publicly discuss living with HIV at a time when fear and stigma surrounding the virus remained widespread.
His announcement came shortly after the death of Midnight Express actor Brad Davis, who died from complications related to AIDS after reportedly keeping his illness private.
Kearns said at the time that he wanted people living with HIV to understand that their diagnosis was nothing to be ashamed of.
His decision was especially striking given the atmosphere in Hollywood during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when many performers worried that revealing an HIV diagnosis could destroy their careers.
But Kearns had already spent years refusing to remain quiet.
One of the defining chapters of his career began in 1986 when he directed the world premiere of playwright Robert Chesley’s Jerker at Celebration Theatre.
The play follows two gay men who meet through a telephone sex line and gradually develop a deeply personal relationship without initially meeting face-to-face.
Set against the AIDS epidemic, the production combined explicit sexual dialogue with a story about loneliness, intimacy, fear and loss.
It quickly became far more than a theater production.
When Los Angeles radio station KPFK-FM broadcast excerpts from Jerker in August 1986, an evangelical minister complained to the Federal Communications Commission about the sexually explicit material.
The dispute exploded into a national debate over indecency, censorship and free speech.
The FCC determined that the broadcast violated its indecency standards and referred the matter involving KPFK’s parent organization, Pacifica Foundation, to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.
The Justice Department ultimately declined to prosecute.
The controversy nevertheless became an important chapter in the broader battle over how the federal government regulated sexually explicit material on American radio.
Kearns argued that the outrage surrounding Jerker was influenced by the fact that the relationship at the heart of the play involved two men.
Years later, he said he believed the reaction would have been different if the same theatrical conversation had taken place between a man and a woman.
The controversy did little to stop the play.
Jerker continued to be staged for decades and became closely associated with gay theater during the AIDS era. Kearns returned to the work repeatedly over the years, both as a director and performer.
His career stretched far beyond that production.
Born Jan. 8, 1950, in St. Louis, Kearns studied at the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago before making his Broadway debut in the 1974 production Tubstrip, a comedy set in a steam bath.
That same year, he made an early television appearance on The Waltons.
His television credits eventually included The Fall Guy, Murder, She Wrote, Days of Our Lives, Knots Landing, Making of a Male Model and HBO’s acclaimed AIDS drama And the Band Played On.
On the big screen, he appeared in The Kentucky Fried Movie in 1977 and director Brian De Palma’s 1984 thriller Body Double.
Kearns also built an extensive theater career.
His stage work included The Dirtiest Show in Town, Intimacies, More Intimacies, The Truth Is Bad Enough, Attachments and Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee?
In productions including Intimacies and More Intimacies, Kearns portrayed people from different backgrounds living with HIV and AIDS, bringing stories about the epidemic directly to audiences at a time when many Americans were still struggling to understand it.
His work offstage was equally important to his legacy.
Kearns served as artistic director of Celebration Theatre from 1986 to 1987 and later founded QueerWise, a spoken-word collective launched in 2011.
He also co-founded Artists Confronting AIDS during the 1980s and wrote multiple books about acting and the entertainment industry.
Across more than five decades, Kearns built a career around subjects that mainstream entertainment was often reluctant to touch, particularly during the darkest years of the AIDS epidemic.
That makes the timing of his death especially poignant.
Nearly 40 years after Jerker first ignited controversy, Kearns had been preparing to step back onto the Celebration Theatre stage and revisit the work that helped define both his artistic career and his activism.
He died just days before that planned return.
Kearns is survived by his adopted daughter, Katherine.
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