Michael Kearns

Michael Kearns was born on January 8, 1950, in St. Louis, Missouri. He traced his love of performing to the age of eight, when he sang "Chattanooga Choo Choo" in a school play. "From that moment to this moment, I wanted to be an actor," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1992. Later in life he described the songs of the late 1960s and early 1970s as the soundtrack that helped "a queer boy in St. Louis" discover himself, a theme he returned to in his final musical memoir. Details of his parents and siblings have not been made public.

Kearns trained at the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago (later The Theatre School at DePaul University), spending about three years there before graduating and moving to Los Angeles in 1972.

In Los Angeles, Kearns made his stage debut in Tom Eyen's The Dirtiest Show in Town at the Ivar Theatre. In 1975 he became the public face of the bestselling book The Happy Hustler, posing as its pseudonymous author Grant Tracy Saxon while the real writer, Thom Racina, stayed out of view.

His film and television credits include The Waltons (1974), The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), Flush (1977), L.A. Tool & Die (1979), Cheers (1983), Making of a Male Model (1983), Body Double (1984), The Fall Guy (1985), Murder, She Wrote (1985), Knots Landing (1991), Dream Man (1991), Life Goes On (1992), And the Band Played On (1993, as Cleve Jones), A Mother's Prayer (1995), It's My Party (1996), Beverly Hills, 90210 (1996) and A River Made to Drown In (1997).

On stage he became one of Los Angeles' best-known solo performers. intimacies (1989) and More Intimacies, in which he portrayed a dozen culturally diverse people with HIV/AIDS, toured cities including San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Washington, Sydney, London, Liverpool and Manchester. Other solo works included The Truth Is Bad Enough, Rock (1992), Attachments, Tell-Tale Kisses, Make Love Not War (a COLA Fellowship commission, 2005) and It Must Be Him: A Genderful Musical Memoir (2023), his sixteenth solo show. He played the title role in Charles Ludlam's Camille (1993) and appeared in Robert Harders' Bill and Eddie.

As a director and producer he staged AIDS/US (1986), AIDS/US II (1990) and AIDS/US/TEENS (1994) for Artists Confronting AIDS, served as artistic director of Celebration Theatre for its 1986 to 1987 season, directed Los Angeles premieres of Robert Chesley's Night Sweat and Jerker, and ran Space at Fountain's End in 2005 and 2006. He taught acting from 1987 and later writing, founded the QueerWise spoken word collective in 2012, and was an artistic associate at the Skylight Theatre and a publisher with Purple Circuit.

Kearns lived openly as a gay man from the start of his career. His partner Philip died in 1992, and soon afterward Kearns decided to adopt. Working through several agencies, he became foster parent and then, in 1997, adoptive father of his daughter Katherine, known as Tia, born in 1994. He wrote that many people doubted a single, white, gay, HIV-positive man could raise a Black daughter, and that raising her deepened his understanding of race and intersectionality. Father and daughter worked together at an orphanage in Johannesburg. He lived for many years in the Silver Lake neighbourhood of Los Angeles. In a 2013 appearance on The Howard Stern Show he spoke about past liaisons with Rock Hudson and Barry Manilow.

Kearns saw acting and activism as inseparable. "To me, being an actor has always had to do with social change," he said in 1992. He refused to treat his HIV diagnosis as a tragedy, argued that Hollywood's homophobia kept gay actors in the closet, and spent decades confronting stigma around AIDS, racism, homelessness and mass incarceration through his plays and teaching. In 2016 he hosted public forums on race in Los Angeles, and in 2025 he called the US government's decision not to officially mark World AIDS Day "monstrous."

Kearns is remembered as a trailblazer who came out decades before it was considered survivable in Hollywood and who put a public face on HIV at the height of the AIDS crisis. Sir Ian McKellen said that as an openly gay man working in Hollywood, Kearns had "earned a place in the history books." The organizations he co-founded, Artists Confronting AIDS and S.T.A.G.E., raised millions of dollars for HIV/AIDS services, and S.T.A.G.E. ran for 33 years. His papers, covering 1950 to 2014, are held in a collection described by the Online Archive of California. Tim Miller remembered him as an "AIDS performer-warrior" and "truly one of a kind."

1987: ACLU of Southern California, Lesbian and Gay Rights Chapter award. 1989: Bay Area Theater Civics Award. 1992: November 19 proclaimed Michael Kearns Day by the mayor of St. Louis. 1993: Drama-Logue Award and Robby Award for Camille; Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle nomination for lead performance. 1999: Victory Award from the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund. Back Stage West Garland Award for Bill and Eddie. 2002: Playwrights' Arena Award for Outstanding Contribution to Los Angeles Theatre. 2005: Robert Chesley Playwriting Award; COLA Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. 2007: LA Weekly Queen of Angels award. 2009: S.T.A.G.E. Producers Award. Lambda Literary Award nominations for T-Cells & Sympathy and Acting = Life.

Books: T-Cells & Sympathy (1995), Acting = Life (1996), Getting Your Solo Act Together (1997), The Solo Performer's Journey (2005), Life Expectancies (2005), The Drama of AIDS, The Truth Is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler? (2012) and Who's Afraid of Michael Kearns. He also wrote for the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, The Advocate, Frontiers and IN Magazine. He was interviewed for the Silver Lake History Collective oral history project in 2013 and 2014, for UCLA's Get Used to It series, and for the 2023 documentary Commitment to Life.

Michael Kearns died on October 5, 2026, at the age of 76. His death was announced on October 6 by his close friend, the performance artist Tim Miller, who wrote: "I am mourning my beloved Michael Kearns. AIDS performer-warrior. Big brother. Friend since 1984. Truly one of a kind." The place and cause of death were not made public. Less than a year earlier, in December 2025, he had given a farewell performance in his hometown of St. Louis. He is survived by his daughter Katherine.