Michael Kearns, Actor, Activist and ‘Jerker’ Director, Dies at 76

Michael Kearns, an actor who appeared in Body Double, Cheers and Beverly Hills, 90210 and directed the world premiere of Robert Chesley’s Jerker, a play about two gay men that generated controversy in 1986, has died. He was 76.

Kearns died Monday, his friend Karen Ocamb reported. The cause of death was not immediately available.

Kearns came out as gay in the mid-1970s during an era of extreme homophobia, then went on NBC in 1991 to announce that he was HIV positive a week after Midnight Express actor Brad Davis died of AIDS — but had kept his health issues a secret so he could keep working.

“I’m doing this for all people with HIV,” he told Ocamb back then. “HIV is nothing to be ashamed of. For me to remain silent indicates shame or fear on some level.”

Kearns was set to appear on Sunday (National Coming Out Day) at the Celebration Theatre in Los Angeles to reprise selections from Jerker alongside friend and colleague Joe Gill.

A post on the theater’s Facebook page said, “We share the community’s sorrow in this loss and celebrate the incredible impact he has had on our mission and the HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ Rights movements. Thank you, Michael, for all you gave this world.”

Debuting during the initial AIDS crisis, Jerker centers on two gay men who fall in love over a phone-sex line. When excerpts from the Celebration Theatre play were broadcast on local radio station KPFK-FM, an evangelical minister heard it and complained to the FCC, which warned KPFK that it could lose its license for broadcasting “indecent” material.

“I was … infuriated and felt that clearly, if this had been a man and a woman having this conversation, having this theatricalized conversation over the radio, the issues would not have been the same,” Kearns told the Los Angeles Times in 1996.

“A lot of people, myself included, look on that as just the beginnings of what continues to rage on, which is censorship of queer work.”

Born in St. Louis on Jan. 8, 1950, Kearns attended the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago and two years after graduation appeared on Broadway in 1974 in Tubstrip, a comedy set in a steam bath. He also made his onscreen debut that year on an episode of The Waltons.

Kearns also showed up on TV on The Fall Guy, Murder, She Wrote, And the Band Played On, Days of Our Lives, Making of a Male Model and Knots Landing and in such films as The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) and Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984).

His theater credits included The Dirtiest Show in Town, Intimacies and More Intimacies — he portrayed culturally diverse people with HIV/AIDS in those — The Truth Is Bad Enough, Attachments and Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee?

Kearns also served as the artistic director at the Celebration Theatre from 1986-87 and at QueerWise, a spoken word collective that he founded in 2011; co-founded Artists Confronting AIDS in the ’80s; and wrote several books about acting.