Good to be bad Long-Time Activist Michael Kearns Endures and Thankfully Won’t Give Up by Dann Dulin
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ichael Kearns is always ready for his closeup. “If you say you’re going to take my picture, I’ll be there!” he quips. “Just give me twenty-five minutes to phoof my hair.” A fierce famemonger, in the same spirit as Oscar Wilde, he echoes the literary icon’s phrase, “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about.” This multi-career man (actor, director, playwright, writer, producer, teacher) has never had that problem. Michael came to prominence in the mid-seventies when he posed as memoirist Grant Tracy Saxon for the book The Happy Hustler, which included a completely nude centerfold. During this reporter’s college days, it was the talk of the campus; however, he was neither the writer nor the hustler. (Though later, Michael did mirror the book and became a working hustler and porn star, indulging in drinks and drugs which led him down a dark, narrow alley). This was decades before Oprah exposed James Frey and his faux book, A Million Little Pieces. But being ahead of his time is nothing new. Michael’s checkered CV also contains other “firsts:” first actor to come out, and the first actor to go public with being HIV-positive, which he announced in 1991 on TV’s Entertainment Tonight. In 1995, this single HIV-positive man adopted an African-American child, Katharine. That may also be a first. As an actor he’s appeared on such hit shows as Cheers, Murder She Wrote, General Hospital, Knot’s Landing, Beverly Hills 90210, and The Waltons (YouTube it as there’s a touching scene between Michael and Richard Thomas). In films, to name a few, he appeared in Brian DePalma’s Body Double, Kentucky Fried Movie, River Made to Drown In, and HBO’s And the Band Played On (playing Cleve Jones). He also performed on Broadway in Tubstrip. As a writer he’s published six books; his latest title is The Truth is Bad Enough: What Became of The Happy Hustler?—a juicy full-on no-holds-barred tell-all. Though he calls himself notorious, what you may not know about Michael Kearns is that he’s been in the trenches of the AIDS war from the beginning of the onslaught. In the mid-eighties he formed Artists Confronting AIDS, a group that produced AIDS-themed plays and he co-founded S.T.A.G.E. (Southland Theatre Artists Goodwill Event), an annual Los Angeles fundrais-
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er that is the longest running AIDS benefit in the country. His advocacy is intensely integrated into his projects, having performed solo theater pieces such as Intimacies and the follow-up, More Intimacies, portraying many ethnic characters with HIV/ AIDS. Michael’s groundbreaking impact on the arts garnered him numerous awards over the years, as well as grants, for his performances and humanitarian accomplishments. Today, though he’s older, he’s hardly mellowed. There’s still a glint of the bad boy and that mischievous, incorrigible force of courage and strength. Clad in baggy jeans, an open striped grey and white dress shirt that renders a loose-fitting red T-shirt, the tall lad has a serious thick head of stunning hair, now streaked grey, and his looks are still alluring, though somewhat weathered and a speck scruffy. Throughout our afternoon together he’s playful, direct, animated, enthusiastic, effusive, entertaining, engaging…and definitively endearing. Yes, the man has more energy than Richard Simmons. In his new tome, The Truth is Bad Enough, he writes an excruciating passage about losing his partner, Eric, in 1997, who is dying from AIDS. “…I kissed his forehead and then his eyes, gently and softly. Without realizing what was happening, I felt my tongue inside his mouth and his tongue was inside mine and we were kissing, as the saying goes, like there was no tomorrow. It was one of the most erotically charged kisses I’d ever experienced—driven and hot, all at once calming and utterly unsettling. He could barely breathe or speak or move his head, but jeez, could he kiss. On his deathbed. Our last kiss.” Eric is but one of countless deaths that Michael has endured through the years. The losses still haunt him. “I think it increases with time. I miss the people more this year than I did last year!,” he laments with an upbeat quality from his apartment in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, overlooking the Hollywood Hills. His cheerfully colorful, modest pad is a mix-mash orgy of tchotchkes and antiques. “The longer I’m around the more I look at those lives that were truncated. I’m sixty-three and so many of my friends didn’t live to be forty! When I was forty-three that didn’t seem sooo horrible and I thought I would be dead about this age or so.” His deadpan tone is offset by an articulate charisma. “Now that I’m older and have done so many things that my friends never experienced, like A&U • SEPTEMBER 2013