Michael Kearns, who was the first out gay actor, has died.
He was 76 years old.
Roland Palencia confirmed Kearns death on social media, saying that Kearns was not feeling well and had called a paramedic on Sunday. The actor died on Monday, The Los Angeles Times reported.
He had been in and out of emergency rooms more than five times recently.
A cause of death has not been released, People magazine reported.
Palencia called Kearns “a friend, mentor, neighbor, and my movie buddy.”
“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.”
Kearns was born in 1950 and grew up in St. Louis. He said that he didn’t fit in when he was younger.
“I couldn’t throw a ball particularly well. I didn’t excel in sports,” he said during a 1998 talk show appearance, the LA Times reported.
“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.”
He said that the theater, instead of being a means to escape his home life, was an awakening.
“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 said.
He studied acting at the Goodman School of Drama, which became the Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago, graduating in 1972.
Kearns said he had to make a choice when embarking on his professional acting career.
“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 said. “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.”
He later acted in projects such as “Body Double,” “The Fall Guy,” and “Beverly Hills 90210.” In 1992, after disclosing he had been diagnosed as HIV-positive, he played a character on ABC’s “Life Goes On” with the illness.
He was also part of the cast of “And the Band Played On,” starring Matthew Modine, Alan Alda, and Anjelica Huston, about the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, Entertainment Weekly reported.
Kearns also had a stage career in shows such as “Camille” and others.
He was scheduled to perform in the coming days at Los Angeles’ Celebration Theatre, commemorating LGBTQ+ theatre history, People reported.
He married Philip Juwig, who died in 1992, the same year they wed. He leaves behind his daughter, Tia Katherine Kearns.
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