Departures of note

Michael Kearns was an American actor, writer, director and activist who became one of the first openly gay actors in Hollywood and, after announcing his HIV-positive status on Entertainment Tonight in 1991, the first openly HIV-positive actor in the industry. Born in St. Louis, he trained at the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago before moving to Los Angeles in 1972, where he built a career spanning mainstream film and television alongside a prolific theatrical output. His screen credits included Body Double, The Kentucky Fried Movie, Cheers, Murder, She Wrote, The Waltons, Knots Landing and Beverly Hills, 90210, and he played Cleve Jones in the HBO adaptation of And the Band Played On.

In the theatre, Kearns directed the Los Angeles premieres of Robert Chesley's Night Sweat and the controversial 1986 play Jerker, about two gay men who fall in love over a phone-sex line, and originated the role of Christopher in James Carroll Pickett's Dream Man. He wrote several solo performance pieces and five theatre books, two of which were nominated for Lambda Literary Awards, and won numerous honors including Drama-Logue, Robby and Garland awards.

A longtime activist, Kearns co-founded Artists Confronting AIDS in 1984 and directed its landmark AIDS/US productions, co-founded the S.T.A.G.E. benefit, and served as a commissioner of PFLAG. He died on October 6, 2026, at the age of 76.