Actor Michael Kearns on living with HIV/AIDS: “I still have a difficult time believing I’m going to live. “

I came across a very compelling interview with actor Michael Kearns the other day and feel that World AIDS Day is an excellent time to share parts of it with you.

Michael, whose film and television credits include And the Band Played On, Nine Lives, It’s My Party and a recurring role on Beverly Hills 90210, came out publicly in the mid-70s and in 1991, made public that he was HIV-positive.

The actor also has extensive stage credits and talked to the website SnowbizNow.com about his life and career.

Here are some excerpts:

On testing positive in 1989: “I had a torrid, and I mean torrid, affair with an actor who died fairly early on.  ….  He died in 1983 or 1984 and I chose to believe that I got it from him.  Looking back, that may or may not have been true, but it made it easier to accept and less shameful.  I don’t regret one orgasm of lovemaking with him, not one.   I don’t regret one minute of any of my sexual exploits—even the one that resulted in the virus entering my body. “

Loss and life imitating art: “I lost one of my closest friends and I went to console his lover.  I believe the body had not yet been removed from the apartment.  When we hugged, the lover’s knees buckled and he fell to the floor in grief.  I’ve never seen that before or since.  I had only moments before I had to go onstage, a few blocks away, playing a character with AIDS in a tumultuous play.  I sometimes thought it was too much—the merging of life and art—but also felt it was my only choice; the only way I could thrive as an artist, an activist, and a person.”

On being a long-term survivor and a parent: “I still have a difficult time believing I’m going to live.  Now it concerns things other than HIV/AIDS that are potentially life-threatening.  I remember, seriously, when I’d order only x number of pieces of stationary, thinking I wouldn’t live long enough to use all of them.  Now we don’t use stationary—except under extreme circumstances.  So I’ve lived.  But the fear has never diminished.  In fact, after becoming a parent—the single best thing I’ve ever done in my life—the fear has increased.  Or let’s say the anxiety.  I have a child.  I will leave her.  That is the most difficult thing in my life to imagine.  THE MOST DIFFICULT.”