Michael Kearns made a deeply personal announcement on television in 1991: he was living with HIV. At a time of devastating stigma, the openly gay actor wanted other people to know that their diagnosis was nothing to be ashamed of.

Kearns died October 5, aged 76. Journalist and longtime friend Karen Ocamb reported his death in the Los Angeles Blade, with Entertainment Weekly publishing a new obituary October 9.

His career crossed television, film and theater. Audiences saw him in shows including Cheers and Beverly Hills, 90210, and in the television film And the Band Played On, which explored the early AIDS epidemic.

In 1992, after making his own HIV status public, he appeared in Life Goes On as a character living with the virus.

That visibility mattered in an industry where gay performers had often been encouraged to remain private, and where HIV carried another burden of fear and discrimination.

Kearns also worked to make room for stories outside mainstream entertainment. He co-founded Artists Confronting AIDS and directed Robert Chesley’s Jerker, bringing gay men’s experiences of intimacy and the AIDS crisis to the stage.

For readers who lived through those years, his story recalls how much courage it could take simply to speak publicly. Visibility came from individuals willing to put their own lives into the conversation.

His personal life held love, loss and fatherhood.

Ocamb remembers attending his wedding with Philip Juwig, who died in 1992. Later, Kearns became an adoptive father to Tia Katherine, now known as Katherine.

She was part of a life much larger than a diagnosis or an acting résumé: family, friendship, creativity and the everyday work of raising a child.

Remembering Kearns means remembering all of those parts together. His advocacy was connected to the lives he wanted people to recognize—their relationships, their humor, their ambitions and their capacity to care for one another.

He leaves behind decades of work that helped gay people and people living with HIV see themselves represented, and helped audiences see the human beings behind the stigma.

Our thoughts are with Katherine and everyone who loved him.

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Dillon Bacchetta had two reasons to feel nervous about trying out for his college’s soccer team. He had never played the sport before.

And, after growing up gay and experiencing bullying, joining a group of mostly straight men felt like a risk.

He made the team anyway. His first college match ended in a 33–0 defeat.

That scoreline was painful. The relationships that followed became something he treasured.

In a first-person essay published by Outsports on October 7, Bacchetta looks back on how soccer helped him find confidence and friendship as an openly gay man.

He had spent years competing as a cheerleader. When he arrived at Atlantic Cape Community College in New Jersey and found there was no cheerleading team, he chose a sport he had always wanted to try.

He practiced on his own before tryouts. Being a beginner meant entering the team without the experience he had built in cheerleading, while carrying fears shaped by the way other boys had treated him growing up.

His new teammates gave him a different experience.

They helped him learn soccer. Friendship grew around ordinary conversations, jokes and advice about relationships. They could talk about girls; he could talk about boys. His sexuality did not become an obstacle to getting close.

For someone accustomed to watching how he spoke and behaved around other men, that ease mattered. He could relax into being a teammate and a friend.

By the end of the season, Bacchetta had become a starter and earned recognition for his improvement. Atlantic Cape’s own account of its 2025 athletics awards also lists him as the men’s soccer team’s Most Improved Athlete.

The personal change reached beyond the field. Learning to trust other men gave him something years of bullying had made difficult to imagine.

His story leaves room for a quieter kind of sporting success: people helping each other, sharing everyday parts of their lives and discovering that they belong together.

A crushing defeat was part of Dillon’s introduction to soccer. So was finding friends who wanted him on their team.

📷 Instagram: @dillbacc

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