Get Used to It: Ep. 52, "Voices of Our Lives: Michael Kearns"

[Applause] [Music] hi i'm chilaquile welcome to get used to it today we have a wonderful treat for you every so often on this show as you may know if you've watched it before we just do a whole hour of a one-on-one interview with one of the most interesting people in our community uh and we've called the series voices of our lives and today i'm going to have that conversation uh for your viewing pleasure with michael kearns who is a theater artist a performer wonderful performer and writer and an activist uh and and i would say an old friend but you're not so old so i would say a friend of long standing michael welcome to get used to it thank you i'm so glad you're here i'm thrilled to be here well i'm a great admirer of your work and uh i don't know if everyone around the country and in hawaii and connecticut and all the places that they watch us might have been able to to see you so before we start talking sort of about how you got to this point describe your work a little bit for for me and for our audience well i think that the handle so to speak is that i've been an openly gay actor since the mid 70s and then more recently came out as a actor who's hiv positive and those two facts have also informed the art that i do so that almost all the work i've done in the past decade deals with issues around hiv and aids even in television and film i've done a few small things but most of my work concentrates on the issues which seem to be the most important to me the most urgent i've i've always managed to use the theater as a forum to say something not only to entertain but to also make a statement and how well let's talk about how sort of you came into being and how one goes from sort of the little boy wherever you grew up to to who you are now little boy where did you grow up st louis missouri and um i think it was a fairly typical childhood dysfunctional as as many of us seem to have experienced and i felt different from and odd and misplaced and ostracized and queer from a very early age not queer homosexual but queer not fitting in and early on i you know i couldn't throw a ball particularly well i didn't excel in sports i but one day i was put in the school play and i excelled suddenly i realized i could entertain and from that moment on it was just like this realization oh my god here is something that i can do i have found it and i was only i was a you know eight or nine years old i think i was actually eight years old when that happened and from that moment on to this very moment i've never ever ever veered from that path i mean my my goal has always been from that moment on to be a better actor a better artist whatever that may be i mean it's become increasingly more varied and complicated as as each year has gone by but once i made that decision that i was going to be a actor an entertainer a performer i never changed my mind i never changed my focus so was there a relationship though in terms of that that feeling uh certainly you know as a as a former actor i i understand well i understand that that click that feeling that this is where i should be this feels so right but i don't know how it was for you it changed for me as i got older the first thing was had some relationship to that not fitting in peace is that how it was for you that's definitely how it was and i think that many of us particularly children and maybe young adults also i think many of us are drawn to the theater to the world of make-believe for all the wrong reasons i think that we go there to escape i went there to avoid my family to get away from it to become somebody other than who i was as i got into my 20s coinciding with an awakening of other areas of my life spiritual sexuality i found that the theater and being an actor was more of a way to truly connect with who i was as a person so it was really the opposite of my initial goal was to escape then ultimately my goal became to be more of who i was now this isn't true of all actors because we know plenty who can continue to camouflage and escape and prove to us that they're something other than what they are but i always thought that the art of acting the purity of it and the joy of it and the challenge of it is to access everything about your true authentic self that's why i feel that acting is is has been so much a part of my growth as a activist i mean i i don't lose sight of the fact that the word act is an activist actor activist this is all about being present being alive moving forward taking a stand so i found those two roles very compatible but there wasn't real activism in your sort of in your early acting were you ever in hiding as an actor i mean at the at the time when you began to realize probably as a young guy um that you were gay um there was still some stigma to it i mean well there was a lot of stigma as you think of a career i mean there's a there's a clash there am i going to have a career or am i going to be honest about this you've stated it beautifully i mean there's really to some extent those are the two roads that are offered one even today in this in this uh liberal city we live in this is still the two choices am i gonna have a career a mainstream career or am i going to choose the other fork in the road which may be filled with artistic adventure and success but it's not going to make you a million bucks likely and you may not get all the opportunities you think you deserve and that's another story i don't know that i was ever particularly trying to prove to anybody that i was anything other than a gay man or even as a little boy an oddball you know who was effeminate and outrageous and larger than life all of those things i don't think that i just never took that from anyone even in my nascent hollywood days when it was being drummed into me by agents and people because you know i looked like a leading man and they were saying you know if you want a career you've got to make sure that voice is lowered make sure this is this and all that wear a wedding ring go out with women be seen in public i never really did that maybe for five minutes i might have tried it but it always just went against some natural instinct i had to be myself and i was exposed to gay men and lesbians i was in the theater at a very early age and i was exposed to affectionate relationships functional relationships between gay men and lesbians from a very early age before i could even attach any sense of sexuality to it i saw these people loving each other functioning so i think that might have been part of it it was not presented to me initially as anything wrong immoral vulgar whatever and and thank god the good thing i can say about my parents is that they also never that's the maybe one of the few good things i can say but that is a big one that they never said anything negative about gay people or homosexuality ever not a word so here you are in st louis you're a kid you're 9 years old or 10 years old you're now becoming an actor and i i guess this is a part of an identity that you embraced i mean was this a good thing for you as a kid i think it was my salvage i don't i don't think that i would have survived my i think i'd have been one of those kids who killed himself or you know became just tragically depressed or i think it really the theater saved me it opened me to this world outside of myself not only in terms of acting but in terms of just the literature of the theater i wasn't a particularly scholarly kid but i loved to read those plays you know and i could read ibsen and i could read chekhov and i could read shakespeare and i learned about human behavior which to me was more important than learning about math or anything else and it instilled me with this sense of self that's really what it did and it gave me you know it satisfied some intellectual curiosity and some spiritual things i think were planted in those early early years which i wouldn't have had if i'd been an ordinary kid i mean i so threw myself into the theater with all my heart and soul that i think it really did save me so you were the one in the in the high school yearbook that uh was you know the actor and it was like good luck on the new york stage and all of that you got it and you know here's the other interesting thing even though i was queer in high school i mean ostensibly different than and other than and and not like the boys who were on the football team and not like the boys who were the geeky scholars i was popular so in spite of the fact that i wasn't doing much to camouflage my queerness or what was ultimately my gayness i mean i was having sexual experiences with men before i graduated from high school so i knew i wasn't broadcasting those but i knew who i was and i knew what i was in this big picture and i knew it was not the same as most of the kids and i didn't go to great lengths to hide that so it was an interesting it's interesting in retrospect to look at that and see that i still had momentum as a human being even though i wasn't engaged in this dance of deception it's sort of like don't ask don't tell i mean they they kind of know and they don't want to know that's right especially in the 60s in st louis missouri but i think that cer i think the teachers knew you know i think that they knew and some of the sophisticated ones nurtured me and and and were drawn to me because of it some of the lesbian teachers and some of the gay male teachers i mean they knew what was going on here and they put me under their wing and took care of me so where from st louis st louis to chicago to goodman theater which was one at that point in time was one of the premier acting schools and i was there for three years and really studied studied studied study but interestingly enough even though this was a ostensibly very liberal acting school it was my first touch of experiencing homophobia in terms of getting roles and in spite of the fact that most of the teachers were gay or lesbian they were they had that somewhat hollywood philosophy that if they knew you to be a homosexual you were not as eligible to play heterosexuals as were those who they knew to be heterosexual so i got my first inkling of what that might be like although by that point i was out out i mean there was no way i was going to alter my off stage behavior to please anyone so we're from chicago right here right to hollywood well you know because of a lover to tell you the truth i i think in retrospect it it all worked out and it all has been an incredible ride but i probably should have gone to new york but then i wouldn't be here talking to you and maybe i would be some you know closeted new york broadway star i doubt that but i came here and because i was having a relationship with somebody who had a real promising screen career as a writer and a director and that really determined the move all my life i was going to new york new york new york new york and i wound up in hollywood where else but it somehow seems michael kearns should have been in hollywood right yes absolutely absolutely i think so so uh i came here and um one of the first shows i did was a show called the dirtiest show in town which was written by tom ian who has since died of aids who also then went on to write dream girls and several mary hartman mary hartman and that show somehow it happened within the first year of my getting here and it was a live show very shocking in its day it had nudity it discussed issues like bisexuality pollution the war in vietnam but somehow again i didn't know this when it was happening but looking back that theatrical experience where it was an act my first equity show in la it really did set the stage for what would be the next 27 years of my life because i was not told to not be gay there was political content there was sexual content there was celebration of gay and lesbian lifestyle and so somehow really i've virtually done the dirtiest show in town over and over and over and over and over and over again and i think that that's fascinating and i love and respect tom ian for putting me in that show and realizing you know seeing that i had this fire and energy as this 22 year old kid and this personality which exceeded anything having to do necessarily with acting talent it was just this sort of being who you were in the moment in those seven years so is this a kind of a transition when you were talking about it informing what you did for the next what you are doing so far for the next 27 years do you mean because there was some um i don't know sort of melding of content and art absolutely i mean this was certainly happening in the 60s and in a very random and wild way right but not so much for me because in the 60s i was in my teens here i was 22 years old and here was this show which was not by today's standards the most politically profound piece of theater we've ever seen but in those days it was attempting to say things at the same time being fun and entertaining and sexy and lively and all those things so yes it was like oh wow i can do this i can make money i can have a good time uh it's okay to take your clothes off it's okay to be gay it's okay to be wild and outrageous it's okay to talk about these issues so it and of course again at the time i don't know that i knew this but when i look back and i see how profound that moment was for me because then there was no going in the closet after that show you know i think it was the first time i was on the cover of the advocate and it was the first time you know i wasn't i don't think that in those days the statement about being openly gay was really a part of the lexicon but eventually in the later 70s it did become that but i just felt a freedom as a as an artist as a gay man as somebody who had some sense of of the the universe and what needed to be changed about it so these things all coalesced in that show and really set the stage for but at the same time probably closed the door hey closed a door interesting yes even though everyone in town came to see that show all the casting people and all the producers and celebrities it was just loaded every night less so then than today on some level i mean i think there was this period where gay was you hear about gay being in now it is in with a lot of restraints attached to it there was a period where it seemed that maybe things were going to be okay especially in the 70s and as the 70s progressed but i think that a door looked like it might have been opening but in reality it was closing and by the time aids started appearing in the early 80s it had really closed i mean even then as my reputation as an actor who played gay roles in the theater became cemented that was virtually all i could play on television and film and so there was a period where basically all i would be cast in was the gay guy and do you regret that no not at all i think that it has made me sometimes obstreperously angry at this town sometimes unduly resentful and sometimes a little loud but uh that's just my working through it i think i have a i think i'm justified in being somewhat resentful and loud and angry uh i think that now i'm older and and i'm toning that anger down and i have other things to concentrate on and in many ways i'm grateful for it because it forced me into another artistic stratosphere that i probably if i had a tv series in the late 70s would i have created intimacies more intimacies rock all the solo work that i've done probably not so it forced me to go deeper it forced me to look at myself it forced me to become an artist really i mean between the kind of rejection of the mainstream community hollywood film and television and the beginnings of aids that's what did it so was intimacies your first uh solo show there was one solo show before that called the truth is bad enough which was about the 70s and about coming out and about being gay a gay male in the culture and was it a uh a monologue about your own life or was it more in the style that you started to adopt in in intimacy good question it was my first sort of autobiographical piece i think that everybody who does solo work i've since done interspersed some autobiography in my work but i think it's like the first the first book someone writes you have to sort of regurgitate all that nonsense that and and i did it and i tried to contextualize it and make it as universal as possible although it it had that sort of self-indulgent quality about it now if somebody had said that to me then i would have like bit their head off screamed cried yelled but now i can say it myself looking back i mean it's one thing to be old and look over this career it's comforting we wouldn't know that yet michael well i feel like i do know anyway but intimacies was the i think the shining moment in terms of really becoming an artist and i think that i i'm not sure that everyone becomes an artist because they see their friends die in front of them and fear their own life and um can't stop crying and can't stop grieving but i think that that's why i was pushed into the role of an artist up until that time i think i was an actor an entertainer somebody who you know had a personality and could do certain things and do them well but the depth of my passion only came with the depth of my sorrow and loss and pain did you know that you were positive at the time no not initially intimacies happened in about 85 86 and it was shortly thereafter there was other aids work prior to intimacies also a lot of plays about aids and that i directed or was in or produced but intimacies was the it was just like it became my thesis or something describe that uh for for out there absolutely many people don't know in intimacies i play six people with aids and i play people who are wildly and widely divergent i got sick of after the initial five years of the 80s the story of the gay white man i mean we heard this story over and over and over and over and over again it was as if there was no one else in the planet who had hiv or aids if you looked at the theater even though on the one hand the gay community was screaming you know it's not only us we kept depicting over and over and over the plight of the gay white male which that story needs to be told deserves to be told should be told on every street corner in america including in this current climate in 1998 however we need to tell other stories and finally i just got tired of reading those scripts and being in those plays and directing those plays and producing those plays i said to myself look you know let's read the paper here and see that there are black women with hiv aids there are homeless people with hiv aids there are hispanic people with hiv aids and each of their stories is particular and different and they suffer isms that are different than the gay white male isms yet that is the soul and heart connection of all of us on this planet this all sounds good i mean the point being that i had to say what would it be like for me to be a black street hooker with no money no insurance um living virtually on the street who has hiv or aids who might have little kids to support and i put myself in these roles of these different people and it it became a a success and i didn't know that when i started out you know and then i i've virtually spent the next several years touring all over the world doing this material practically every major city in the united states and then i added about six more characters called that more intimacies and then i did variations and it seemed to be seems to be my contribution and you know i've continued since then but nothing seems to me to be as connected to a picture larger than my narcissistic um world you know and i think that this and i think that this is still more profoundly the issues that need to be discussed today again you know we're on this euphoric trip of aids is over and and the cocktail this and the cocktail that and yes i'm on the cocktail and i'm grateful but i have insurance and i'm white and i'm male and there are a lot of people in this world who aren't any of the above who are suffering from aids just as severely as people were suffering from aids in 1981 it is no different for the homeless person for the woman the black woman with five kids on the street whose children are hiv positive it has not changed at all for any of those people and if we haven't learned anything from this disease haven't we i thought that one of the things we learned when we were visiting the bedsides of our friends was compassion and a depth of understanding and something spiritual well that spirituality and that compassion and that depth of understanding cannot just be confined to the block we live on or to west hollywood or to l.a it has to become more global and bigger than ourselves well it was very powerful to watch your first show or the first the you know the intimacies it was very powerful to watch you uh transform yourself i mean literally uh with i mean nothing we're not talking really a little lighting change a little music but it was you and it was simply from within and it was such empathy and really required the audience to to see that wasn't preachy wasn't hello i'm making these connections for you it was simply to present these people very powerful very powerful people i teach this to my students there are times when the theater is magic and you have to do a lot of work to get it to be magic you have to work on your voice and you have to work on your body and you have to work on you have to become skilled and you have to rehearse and you have to do but then there is a point where it's magic intimacies more intimacies to some extent rock was magic it was blind faith that those voices would come every night it was something way bigger than anything i'd been taught in acting school it was something far greater than that and it changed me as a person i mean not only did it maybe help somebody in the audience but every it was selfish too because every night i got to experience something out of my own head out of my own as i said you know my own self indulgence self-involved voices going on about how important i am you know and we all live in that voice sometimes too often well i uh tell me about your new work okay three new characters it's called um telltale kisses and um i i think it will be running throughout may actually in l.a um three generations of gay men looking at the as the millennium approaches looking at loss sex love um growing up i think it's a growing up piece for me uh i interestingly enough i play somebody about 30 somebody about 50 and somebody about 70. and in some ways i emotionally relate to the guy 70 almost more than the other two i just feel he's a dad and he talks about his his relationship with his child but i look at uh it's very romantic this piece and it's i think it's about the struggle that we continue to have particularly gay men in terms of identity about our sexuality and about issues of compulsive sexuality and issues of romance and issues of um marriage children all those things now will it be called an aids piece of course because my my name my middle name is aids so it will be called an aids piece although it's about so much more as you point out so are the intimacies pieces but um yes aids continues to be a backdrop in my work and i suppose until the last person on the face of the earth does not have aids it will continue to be the backdrop for my work and what do these three men know about aids because you you must have you identify some distinction i mean i i wish that it was possible to to to describe but i mean you have to see the whole performance i think how the the teachable moments in your work are really from within it doesn't ever tell us anything it shows us a lot but what what is the difference between and among i haven't asked you this question so i'm this is a brand new one the what the 70 year old man knows about aids and things about aids what the 50 year old and what the 30 year old well it's a great great great great great question the 30 year old is going to go straight after being a circuit boy a party boy a fast lane boy he is going to go straight he believes that he will one day have the virus rid from his system and he is going to go home to indiana and get married and raise a family and please his parents so that's what he thinks about it so it's a kind of almost um penance that's the penance he'll do for you get rid of this a bad boy in the fast lane wow it hurt makes me it hurts to say it and then the second character has gone blind from cmv so his first line is good news bad news alive blind wow he never thought he was going to live so here he is blind with many more years ahead of them him than he ever thought all of his friends or dad are dying so he has to cope with why am i alive the the duality of wanting to die and be with his friends and be with his memories and yet having to confront the future as a blind person and the third character has been in a monogamous relationship for 40 years with a lover he his son was virtually taken away from him when he was a young man and the son reconnects with him and the son is dying of aids and the lover is dying of alzheimer's so we have the backdrop of him dealing with these two deaths he however is reconciled that life has reconnected him with his his son and given him a 40 year relationship and how even though he's experiencing this this loss how can he be anything other than grateful the last line of the show is i must remind myself that i am a very lucky man now it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that that's me speaking and in spite of every loss and there are too many to even enumerate and in spite of the own hiv that continues to course through my veins in spite of drug cocktails i'm a lucky man well there are a lot of reasons that we could name but i think tia is one will you talk about that he you know i was thinking today tia is for the record my three and a half soon to be four year old african-american adopted daughter tia catherine kearns and i was thinking today that tia is the perfect match for me i mean every aspect of tia's personality even the things that other people might find problematic or even offensive i love in a person i mean she's tough she's stubborn she's loud she's opinionated she's decisive she's no nonsense i mean she's just the perfect person for me now that doesn't mean that we don't have our squabbles and our uh clashes of temperament because we are so alike but somebody gave me this child who whose personality is exactly what i it's the qualities i like about you it's the qualities i like about all my friends this fierceness this won't take the answer no this determination this facing every day so she's my comrade my friend my i mean it's it's just uh an uncommon bond that i can't quite describe and how did you come to be tia's dad well i decided after my lover philip who you knew died i i looked at the rest of my life and i said what now i've had this career success i had a successful relationship albeit one that was short-lived i've had certain gifts and experiences and things in life what is what is it that i haven't had that i've always wanted and the answer to that question kept coming back to be a dad to be a father over and over so a long process of discussing every which way should i co-parent should i find a lesbian who's willing to do an arrangement and i interviewed people and i spoke to people some of whom you probably know and i went to lawyers and i went to you know i read books and i read articles and after all was said and done i decided no what i really wanted was to be a single parent and to take all the responsibility and so first i did foster care to get my feet wet and to see what the challenges were like and to see if i was up to it emotionally physically stamina-wise all those things so i had several situations in foster care and then tia came to me as a foster baby with pretty much a likelihood of moving into an adoption and then there was an arduous two-year seven-month period where we didn't know 100 that she would be my daughter but then finally that happened and um and was it immediately happily ever after was it difficult because you were gay was it difficult because you were hiv positive i mean was here's what's interesting it was primarily difficult this is the interesting aspect because as male 1 the issues of uh a man wanting to be a parent are so out of whack in terms of what the system thinks what the public thinks what most people think uh it's just that why would this single man forget gay forget hiv positive forget over 40 forget white all those those were all issues the biggest issue is why would a man want to take care of a baby gay men can't grasp this a lot of them women were my allies from the get-go lesbians and straight women no woman ever said to me but you're hiv-positive not one ever they understood this overwhelming need to be a parent they never had that problem understanding that so that was the biggest problem the others were all hurdles my being white was a hurdle my being gay was a hurdle my being hiv positive was a hurdle my being over 40 was a hurdle probably my being an actor on some level was a hurdle because i don't have a steady income so i basically had everything going against me in terms of this adoption including not the support of some people who were my very close friends so even that i didn't have so i learned a lot about myself during these last few years and your friends i guess and my friends some of whom i mean i also have an incredible support system of friends who who help me on a daily weekly basis with tia otherwise i could never have done it and that also i want to point out to comfort the viewers because people do need comforting on this issue and they really do her life is set up if if i die in a car accident later this afternoon that the people she's been surrounded with for more than three years she will continue to be surrounded with and by and she has many relationships i may be the primary spoke on the wheel but the wheel will continue to move without me and i've set it up this way consciously from the get-go never denying the fact that i'm hiv-positive and not necessarily believing that the drug cocktails are going to keep me alive for the next 50 years i'm always in reality mode and have been from the beginning tia came into the world with a big question mark over her head she could have gone into a foster situation where she was thrown across the room and killed before she reached the age of one she could have been in multiple foster homes she could have been in an adoptive circumstance which was not perfect so i think she's had a pretty great life so far and even if something happens to me i believe that her life will continue to be a great one being nurtured by people who are black and white gay and straight young and old you know she's a very uh variegated family it must be fun going to the grocery store with the two of you well it's it's like watching a test of people's responses i mean i now sort of block it out but tia also has a tendency to like want to connect with everyone in the grocery store so this isn't a demure little child who's sort of minding her own business this is a child who's saying hi hi do you have a cat do you have a dog what's your name how many cats do you have what's your what's her name what are you buying so you know they you know sort of look and then and and we've been through everything including told screamed at i was screamed at once in a haid ashbury health food store that's not your baby by a black woman just screaming at me so i've had the ugliest experiences i've also had particularly black women who come up to me because they can put the circumstance together and say it's great you have her i i just want you to know so sometimes people overcompensate to let me know they're supportive but other times you know a lot i hate to say this but lots of you know snotty looks from gay men um at the french marketplace sometimes you know like what are you doing on our territory with that child you know and you just sort of say to yourself you know we hear all this stuff about the 90s and about we're going to be parents and but when you're out there in the world living it there's a small number of us they're more lesbians than gay men they're a small number of gay men who are being parents at this point and there's still a lot of discrimination and judgment about it well it's funny when we we think about identity and i know that uh when i first understood that i was a lesbian and i was 17 in a relationship for a long time 12 13 years there was just no question that we weren't going to have children we didn't know exactly how to go about we didn't tell anybody absolutely and so in coming to that decision to some extent i can't speak for gay men but that generation or some of that generation that didn't already have children it's kind of like you draw the line and then you justify it in a funny way like well they were i mean they used to say breeders that was what straight people did and we didn't do that we weren't locked into that and you know then you would wake up and go now why are we celebrating this again i can't remember because family is such a wonderful thing and there began to be sort of this this turn uh many lesbians who already had children were saying hello you're excluding us from this community you know you can't make fun of us etc but it was and gay men who had lost their children really had also blocked them realize they could reunite with them right right no and also here's another interesting point to be made i think that many gay men have internalized that molester role that has been foisted upon them by the system when i went to adopt the first thing that was said to me as i explained to you was your biggest issue is male male equals molester in the minds of many people just male a single male wanting to adopt or be around children is dangerous and that's and how could gay men not have internalized that role that that stereotype it's on the news every day i mean they love nothing more than to announce that that molester is a gay man they don't announce the sexuality when it's a heterosexual right so we've internalized that and i think a lot of gay men don't believe they're worthy of parenting and we got to change that i see one of the most thrilling things is i can see it in the eyes of these young boys like if t and i are in a gay identified sort of coffee shop and you see them and you can see this sense of oh my god i could do that i see it in their faces and they're the ones who probably will you know i mean i i think as as we evolve and i think we are we're learning we're we're absolutely learning it must be very hard though you know we say gee it's wonderful for you young people now because we've opened all these doors and you can have this gay identity and you're just fine but i i see them struggling still i mean around aids issues for instance i don't see all this certainty in young men and i hear rumors and stories about uh high-risk behavior and do you see i mean what changes do you see sort of in aids activism or awareness or whatever and especially in the gay male community i think we're in trouble i think that i still think that the issues of self-esteem i think that the issues are much more complicated than simply saying to somebody have safe sex and i i think that we need to look at so many different issues that we're not looking at i mean we're trying to just put this don't you know just say no mentality on a fragile psyche and a fragile sensuality and sensibility it's just not and it's not working i mean these kids are having inordinate amounts of unsafe sex serial conversion is going on at shockingly high rates and that's the younger population then we have the older population some of whom are hiv positive or have aids who are camouflaging and disguising in another way this sort of obsessive quest to remain young and beautiful i mean when we look at the pages of the gay papers this this obsessive issue with vanity and and and what one looks like liposuction and botox this and muscles that and where have we learned have we learned any lessons isn't there something that we need to solve and fix on the inside shouldn't we be looking at what's inside i'm concerned i'm concerned about my generation and i'm concerned about the youngsters the other thing is i think that still young men are seroconverting because they want to be part of the club they feel so ostracized so less than so disconnected they want to become hiv positive to become part of this fraternity it looks good it looks glamorous there's support group and i am so conscious of this that you know learn the lessons without becoming hiv positive if i had it to do over again i would have learned these lessons without seroconverting the advantage here is is to listen to people who have lost and and those from the grave who are sometimes speaking to us like paul minnette and jim pickett etc one need not zero convert to be to feel powerful or to feel a part of and i think that that's out there i just think that when we act like aids is over and i hear this repeatedly and act like aids doesn't exist any longer we are back into a state of delusion and denial that could only be matched by the early 80s as we end the 90s and i think that we have to wake up all over again and and reassess the issues and particularly look at the youth well i think it's the power part of the power i come back to in in the work that you do it's always interesting to me that people go into politics because they think they will you know manufacture a world that is somewhat different and the theater is very much like that but it's kind of spotty it just depends on who shows up in a way who your audience is uh what are you going to you know to get from this uh when i was in junior high school i went to see julie harris do the lark you know the the story of joan of arc on wii's play uh here at the biltmore when there was still a theater at the biltmore hotel and i went back 13 times [Laughter] just to watch she was on stage every minute and it wasn't just that she was luminous as an actress there was such strength and power in the way she played it it was like every performance those voices were a surprise to her and it was not that she was so incredibly special but what she had to do with it and i think that's on some level it was such a message to me that if you do hear voices you have to do something with it you have to save france you know i mean it was very it's very interesting and to this day and you can only imagine how long ago i was in junior high school i remember those performances and that message and the the first time i saw you perform solo perform i was so moved i couldn't forget uh the characters and you know and what they said and what you do is so important um so say again that the name of your new show and the news where it's going to go tell tale kisses and it will have five performances at highways which is my home and my sanctuary and my church and then it will move uh to glaxa studios on sunset and silver lake and i'll be there during june and do you think you might be traveling with it i probably will travel less with tia and the older tia gets the less we'll travel probably i traveled in the earlier days a little bit easier but you know that's fine too i mean i'm i'll what i will do is more one-nighters as opposed to a run so i'll do a bigger venue it's not ideal for me because i love being in small theaters i love being in theaters with like five people in the audience i'm the only actor in the world because i feel like i can reach everybody the highways has what right yeah about 100 yeah 100's great but uh yeah i'll get around i i will continue to get the message out there i love your analogy about hearing voices because i sometimes think that that's really what it is i mean i think that [Music] one does hear some voice that's larger than oneself and i think that too often we say oh this is ridiculous and you go for the mundane or the pedestrian when what we need to be doing is listening to that higher consciousness that spiritual voice that voice that is ephemeral at best in the real world and follow it i mean i heard some voice that said be an actor i then heard some voice that said be an activist and thank god i listened to those voices and i didn't go off and become a bank teller not that there's anything wrong with being a bank teller be closer to a lot of money than we may have not only knows that's i've never been around that much money the spirituality that you you've mentioned it a couple of times and i wonder um the connection what the connection is uh as you see it between the work that you do and the way you do your work and this spiritual quality you've talked about i think that any actor who is acting with a purity of heart and soul it has to be a spiritual experience you are in essence being willing to go up in front of a room full of people and show yourself in all its entirety not always the most attractive aspects of yourself sometimes ugly things sometimes unattractive things that make the audience want to turn away this is an act of a sublime act of giving or it should be acting is truly the opposite of what is perceived by many people many people perceive acting to be a narcissistic vain glorious kind of um masturbatory profession when in truth acting is about giving giving giving which is spiritual it's about connecting with people other than yourself and finding human threads that connect that's spiritual it's about all it's it's an offering up to an audience whether there are five or five thousand you are going out there and giving yourself and you are giving sometimes the playwright if that playwright is different than the performer you're transmitting those words those feelings those thoughts how can it not be spiritual i think it's just a spiritual i think going to the theater can be at its purest an equally spiritual experience to going to a church and in fact we've seen that particularly with around issues of aids and gay and lesbian coming out stories the people are sobbing in the theaters people have transformative experiences like you had going to the theater and they're not going to get a lot of this in tv and film because it can't go quite as deep or as far and it's not personal i mean it's not real in a funny way i mean there it looks real you get engaged in a film uh television less so just because it's small and it's in your own home and it's easy to disconnect you cannot disconnect in the theater you are in there it's dark you are so close and especially i think in the and solo performance uh even in a larger venue if you know if if 100 people seems large you're very close we're very close to you michael and you can't really escape especially your own intensity i mean it's a very intense and feels very individual uh connection i know as a member of of the audience yeah good you do it i mean you do it very you said it's demanding on the audience this is also i mean we live in a world where one you know is used to a three-minute video being about as demanding as some people can get but it's demanding to go spend an hour or 45 minutes or an hour and 45 minutes in a theater it does demand something you have to bring yourself into that seat when you go to or ideally you should and it's much more confrontive than as you point out the tv or or film and that's why i belong in the theater now i want to ask you one difficult question with a few minutes remaining and you you touched on it a little bit in talking about tia and i wonder it because you you know that you're hiv positive and you have been for a while and the cocktails are wonderful and we're all very happy that now you have to worry about what to do with your life because that's a really good thing but you must also have a sense as you indicated because you said you were planning for tia you must also have a sense that it might not be as long as it might have been were you not does that scare you i really don't think that it scares me i think that it makes me sad particularly in relationship to tia at this point the only creature i can't imagine saying goodbye to is tia i can imagine because i have imagined it all of the others i can imagine saying goodbye i can imagine giving them mementos and having this be a pretty clean and neat experience i can't fathom separating from that child i cannot fathom it it's not something that i can go to and that really is the biggest hurdle about my death at this point it's not about anything else i mean i think i could die pretty peacefully later this evening if it weren't for that bond and she'll be fine i really believe that also i think she'll be fine i just i have to i don't know i guess that's my task is to to find some peacefulness about severing that relationship well you you really aren't severing it in a way i guess i mean that's sort of the spiritual aspect of your having been having made the decision to enter into it that's right that's the question you gave her something the bond you know that she would never have had and what a happy kid i mean everybody out there watching you imitate her in the grocery store has said to themselves now that's that kid is secure they do say you know that's a happy kid or she wouldn't be going around saying how many cats do you have exactly she's the neighbor incredibly and people say that you know and she really is and she has a sense of herself that i think i've instilled in her and i think that's all we can do for anyone i think that's all we can do for an audience i think that's all we can do for a lover i think that's all we can do for a student all we can do for our children is to instill them with a sense of okayness about who they are i never tell her to be anything other than what she is i don't tell her to not be stubborn or not be difficult or not be opinionated or not be strong and and willful i don't tell her not to be those things i tell her that you know you're going to have to curtail sometimes to the world outside but i want her to be all those things well i can't believe that a whole hour has gone by and we're at the end of it already and i have had a wonderful time thank you so much for being here i hope you had as wonderful a time as we had since as michael has pointed out it's the audience's experience that really is part of it it's for you and i hope you get to see michael perform if you haven't seen him perform michael kearns theater artist activist and i'll tell you once you watch him perform you could absolutely get used to it [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you