By G. Bruce Smith
Photo by Theresa Kennedy
There’s something rather touching about what is revealed when interviewing Michael Kearns, the pioneering gay HIV-positive actor/playwright/activist. Kearns, at 73, is taking to the stage once more in a solo show that, among other things, is about unrequited love: It Must Be Him: A Genderful Musical Memoir, will be performed Dec. 10 at Lineage Performing Arts Center in Pasadena. (It’s his first solo show since 2019, when he performed Wet Hankies at Highways in Santa Monica for its 30-year anniversary during Pride month.)
As a man who talks about being in his “final act,” Kearns speaks of unrequited love — never mind his status as something of a celebrity, particularly in LGBTQ circles, for being one of the first out gay actors in the 1970s and one of, if not the, first out HIV-positive actor/solo artists (in 1989).
And so, it is perhaps not surprising that he has taken Vicki Carr’s 1967 song, “It Must Be Him,” which was a big hit, to give voice to his own longing for love, to give voice to all the young gay men of the 1960s and 1970s who found that their own pent-up, deeply private feelings were best expressed by women singers of that time.
And when Vicki Carr sings “It must be him, it must be him, Or I shall die, Or I shall die,” what might seem to be a hyperbolic lyric carries for Kearns a more literal meaning. In essence, he says that there have been “life and death stakes” for gay men with AIDS who have not found love.
In his new solo show, Kearns does something he has never done before: He sings. Ten songs (accompanied by Leigh Anne Gillespie). Not just “It Must Be Him.” (Almost all the songs in his show, he says, came out around 1968 when he was 18 years old.) Kearns says that during the pandemic he worked with Ryland Shelton (who directs the show) to learn to sing. Again, because so many of these songs by female artists resonated with him as a gay man of a certain age. He speaks of a course of life marked by “troubled relationships,” not only with lovers but also with his mentally ill father who was in and out of hospitals for many years. He also had a difficult relationship with his mother, he says.
Over the decades of his career, he has not only been an actor, but he has also taught acting and now focuses his teaching on writing. He is also the author of critically acclaimed plays, 17 of which have been produced in North America and Europe. Many of his earlier plays deal with AIDS, but he has also written about the Iraq War and other subjects. And then there are his published literary works that include his plays but also a memoir, The Truth Is Bad Enough, which Sir Ian McKellen praised as a “story with an honesty and humor that puts most other show-biz autobiographies to shame.” There’s more; but in a nutshell, he cannot be easily pigeonholed.
Among the accolades he has received for his work is this, from the Los Angeles Times, about his show More Intimacies: “Kearns is a modern-day Dickens, capturing with devilish detail AIDS sufferers hooking and injecting their way through life.”
Despite the praise and his forceful activism, Kearns says he is “emotionally frail. I’ve never wanted to say that because I’m supposed to be strong, I’m supposed to be a role model.”
Which brings us back to It Must Be Him, which could be seen as one of his more vulnerable works, though Kearns says, “Everybody wants to market their vulnerability. It’s not a commodity.”
Yet, Kearns says that there is “safety in public performances,” that it is when he is onstage that he feels the “most invulnerable.”
“Why do people do solo shows?” Kearns says. “It’s tough but it feels so good. Solos really captured what I really wanted to do, which was talking about what was happening around the world.”
As he reflects back on his life, he doesn’t hesitate when asked what he wants to be remembered for most: fatherhood. In 1994, he adopted a 5-month-old African-American daughter (unusual for a single gay man at the time), Katherine, now a television writer for shows including The Walking Dead and Hacks.
Katherine Kearns and Michael Kearns, circa 2004. (Photo by Richard Hartog/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images, Courtesy of Michael Kearns)
He confesses parenthood is the most difficult role he has had — particularly because he is a single parent. “I go back and forth from mommy to daddy in one sentence,” he jokes, displaying his singular brand of humor that appears in his works.
Perhaps what drives the narrative of It Must Be Him most is the concept of aching desires.
As he says in a YouTube promo of his show: “You still have emotions, you still have yearnings, you still have desires when you’re 73 years old.”
He then elaborates: “If I didn’t have desires, I’d have a hard time getting out of bed. The desires are not the same as when I was in my 40s, 50s or 60s. Now, it’s the desire to connect on an individual basis; with friends, boyfriends, lovers and audiences. As E.M. Forster said, ‘Only connect.’”
Michael Kearns will perform It Must Be Him: A Genderful Musical Memoir at 4 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 10 at Lineage Performing Arts Center, 920 E. Mountain St., Pasadena. michaelkearnswriter.com/it-must-be-him. The show will also be performed in 2024 in Palm Springs, St. Louis, Chicago, and Los Angeles, specific dates and locations to be determined.
