Sir Patrick Stewart – the actor perhaps best known for his stern but empathetic leadership as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the moral center of the universe in “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and wheelchair-bound telepath, mutant protector and mentor Professor Charles Francis Xavier, or Professor X, in “The X-Men” – died on Wednesday at age 86 from Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia.

Glowing tributes have underscored Stewart’s dignity, humor, and delight in the art and craft of acting. But only the day after Stewart’s death have stories surfaced about how Stewart bucked Hollywood homophobia and flaunted his straight love for fellow gay thespian Ian McKellen, including their very public affectionate kisses.

In a long tribute statement on social media, McKellen wrote about Stewart’s pride in being born and bred in Yorkshire, England. “You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt. Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues. He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire, and, in my case, love.”

McKellen called his friend “the most respected and beloved actor of his generation on either side of the Atlantic.”

When the “Star Trek” franchise was revived and Stewart introduced the world to Jean-Luc Picard – a role McKellen originally advised him against taking after 40 years at the Royal Shakespeare Company – it was Stewart’s classically trained baritone that first won over skeptical fans. It was the voice of a mythical father beginning a good bedtime story, luring us into the realms of the imagination with each opening of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

“Space: the final frontier,” Stewart’s Picard intoned. “These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

Women and girls immediately recognized the changes from the original “Star Trek.” Space was no longer a vast starlit emptiness where “no man has gone before.” Instead, Stewart’s Captain Picard was an empathetic, erudite thinker with a French name and English accent for whom inequality was abhorrent, as Stewart also vehemently believed. If William Shatner’s Captain Kirk was an impetuous cowboy, Picard was a mature, experienced military commander with scruples.

“Captain Picard stood for the best of us, and so did the man who played him,” Shatner wrote in tribute to his friend.

Patrick Stewart also had a refreshing sense of self-deprecation. Imagine how many Sesame Street kids he made less afraid of reading Shakespeare after his rousing Hamlet in “B or Not a B,” which Sesame Street cited in its appreciation of the actor.

Stewart embodied another famous line from “Hamlet” about the purpose of acting: “To hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”

And this Stewart did, especially in league with McKellen as they had fun revealing the depth and humanity of their characters. The pair made Shakespeare and even Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” accessible, relevant and at times, funny.

McKellen told ABC News that he broke down in tears after their London run of “Godot” ended in 2009. They reprised “Godot” on Broadway in 2013, playing Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” in repertory as well.

“I recall vividly,” Stewart told Lesley Stahl for a CBS Sunday Morning interview on Oct. 13, 2013. “In fact, it’s on film. I had no idea it was going to come. But the curtain came down on our last performance, and he went into the wings and sat on some stone steps and sobbed, heartbroken that it was over.”

“Yes, I was heartbroken,” McKellen told Stahl. “And then we were going to say goodbye to each other. You were going off to do other things, and I just felt I would never be as happy again.”

They bonded on the set of the first “X-Men” film in 2000, where they played rivals Xavier and Magneto, McKellen told Channel 4 UK News in a 2014 interview with Stewart sitting beside him. McKellen came out publicly in 1988 and felt in tune with the role of Magneto because, as a gay man, he identified with mutants despised by society for being different.

Channel 4 described the interview as “Gandalf and Picard: a bromance made in sci-fi heaven.”

The two became so close that McKellen got an accredited license through the Universal Life Church to officiate Stewart’s third marriage in 2013 to Sunny Ozell in a Mexican restaurant after a performance of “No Man’s Land” in Berkeley, California. Stewart told CBS News it was Ozell’s idea.

The unabashed public display of affection between the straight and gay men generated headlines and lots of social media, including a soon-corrected slip by The Guardian calling Stewart gay. He took it in stride, and after the Poynter Institute noted the Guardian’s gaffe, Stewart weighed in with what The Huffington Post called “an awesome response to being ‘outed’ as gay.”

Stewart said he responded in “the only way I could,” by tweeting: “But @guardian I have, like, five or even SEVEN hetero friends and we totally drink beer and eat lots of chicken wings!”

“Quite frankly, I was utterly flattered by that assumption,” Stewart later told The Advocate. “And indeed, the first contact I had was from Ian McKellen, who sent me an email saying, ‘Congratulations!’ And I accepted the congratulations and said, ‘I think this is a very distinctive honor that I’ve been awarded.’”

In The Advocate interview about Stewart’s film Match, Stewart says he wanted to play bisexual Juilliard dance teacher Tobias “Tobi” Powell right after reading the screenplay.

“There are very few roles each year that come along which have this level of detail and complexity, as well as narrative development,” Stewart said. “The depth of satisfaction in mining all that is so intense and is, for me, the primary attraction of this job that I do.”

And Stewart was not interested in mining the character of a flat stereotype.

“When I look back to my early career and early experience, my ease and comfort being in the company of and intimately close with gay and lesbian colleagues and friends was always, for me, the most natural, and I might even say at times appealing aspects of the life I was living,” Stewart told The Advocate.

“I think this is where the theater is such an appealing world, because it embraces everything and always has. So there was never a moment where I made an intellectual choice that I would be a supporter of gay civil rights. It was always a natural and uncomplicated choice,” he continued. “Then later in life, as I got to know well-known activists like Ian McKellen, I was only too happy to join campaigns, march, and support in whatever way I could because it always seemed to me to be something that much too much fuss was being made about.”

And Stewart didn’t shy away from PDA. When Stewart, 74, and his wife showed up at the London premiere of 76-year-old McKellen’s new film, Mr. Holmes, their bromance lit up the press and went viral. They continued to share their love and kiss on red carpets.

“Gay men have played a part in my life as colleagues and friends,” Stewart told Playboy in 2024. “But none so significantly as Ian. I love him, and I’m in love with him. So is my wife, and it’s mutual. I listen to him, I watch what he does — and I don’t mean just acting – how he lives his life is so admirable, selfless, and compassionate. We also have a hell of a lot of fun.”

This is all delightful, of course. But it is perhaps not as monumental as Stewart’s performance in the 1995 romcom film Jeffrey, in which he delivered what pop culture enthusiast Tom Bishop called “a masterclass in playing gay.”

“Based on a hit off-Broadway play, ‘Jeffrey’ was originally released as a movie in summer 1995,” Bishop writes. “With the tagline: ‘Love is an adventure when one of you is sure… and the other is positive,’ it explored the emotional challenge of trying to have sex and relationships at a time when the gay community was ravaged by AIDS.”

Gay playwright Paul Rudnick, who wrote the play in 1992, explained to The Body in 2021: “The mainstream media was completely ignoring the plague, and, Lord knows, the government was aggressively ignoring the plague, so it was one of the few times when theatre became essential.”

Gay people like Larry Kramer and Tony Kushner wrote their masterpieces “The Normal Heart” and “Angels in America,” respectively. But Rudnick was a comic writer and didn’t know if there was a place for him.

Until he and a friend visited a cranky dear friend dying in the hospital. When they left, they mumbled how – as much as they loved him – they really wanted to slap him! They started “laughing helplessly,” and that prompted the idea for Jeffrey.

“We’d both just come from the bedside of a dying man, and I realized this is where we’re living now. I so appreciated that—especially at that time when there were no treatments available whatsoever, there weren’t even any tests—that a sense of humor and the wit of the gay community was one of the only weapons available, and I really wanted to pay tribute to that,” Rudnick said.

“That’s what I wanted to explore,” he continued, “and that’s how I was able to get to a place of hope. I thought, there’s enough genuine tragedy in the world. There are pockets of joy that people are discovering.”

After seeing the play, Larry Kramer told Rudnick the play “cheered him up and made him want to go on a date.”

Patrick Stewart had just finished filming the final season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and wanted a role very different from Jean-Luc Picard. He rejoiced at playing Jeffrey’s longtime lover, Sterling, a fabulous interior decorator.

Though critics were not kind, Bishop writes, “Nevertheless, the movie was praised for its passion, originality, and wit. This was embodied by Patrick Stewart, whose performance as Sterling received universal acclaim.”

In a 1995 interview about the role, Stewart told the Los Angeles Times: “I had seen the play in Los Angeles, and I was sent the screenplay and was reading it while filming the last few days of the Star Trek movie. I just thought it was so brilliant and ultimately so moving that it felt as if I had no choice but to do it.

“We were filming on top of this finger of rock in the Nevada desert, shooting some violent action sequences with Malcolm McDowell,” Stewart said. “It was 119 in the shade, and I was sitting there reading the script. Well, I completed it and found that I needed both wardrobe and makeup to help me because my face was streaming with tears and the tears dripped off onto my spacesuit.”

The only unease Stewart felt about playing the role “was that I would not be convincing as a gay man with a lover in New York. So I would say to Chris [Ashley, Jeffrey director] and Paul [Rudnick, ‘Jeffrey’s’ writer-producer], who are both gay men, ‘Please tell me if there is any moment at which you think that doesn’t ring true or if I’m using some cliché which would appear to be a shallow approach to what we’re doing.’”

What did Ian McKellen say, “Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues.”

Patrick Stewart had a big heart that was open to LGBTQ+ people. And he made people with AIDS, and their lovers and friends, laugh a bit and remember love before death became the final frontier.

For that, as much as for his extraordinary talent, LGBTQ+ people will remember Patrick Stewart with deep affection and appreciation.

This is a cross-post from Karen’s LGBTQ+ Freedom Fighters Substack.

In a world fraught with anxiety and fear, waking up Wednesday morning, Oct. 28, with a Goldilocks feeling that everything was just right was just odd. And then breaking news confirmed it: Dolores Huerta, icon, civil rights legend, hero to the long, too-often-ignored farm workers movement, had died of cancer at her home in Bakersfield, CA, at age 96.

Dolores’ impact was beyond what could ever be documented. As a 15-year-old in Westport, Connecticut, for instance, I stopped eating grapes to support the Farm Workers Grape Boycott that Dolores and Cesar Chavez started as founders of the United Farm Workers in 1965.

Decades later, as a working reporter, I could only beam as I introduced myself, asked for a quote, and took numerous photos of Dolores with young delegates to the California Democratic Party convention. They loved and appreciated her, just as they knew she loved and appreciated them.

But as Goldilocks timing would have it, I was already scheduled to interview Michael Weinstein, co-Founder of the AIDS Hospice Foundation and Founder of its successor, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.

Michael felt very honored to have worked often with Dolores and to call her a friend. He was scrambling with his team to immediately set up an ofrenda (sacred altar) at the site of Dolores Huerta‘s mural – by world-renowned Los Angeles muralist Robert Vargas – at the Barclay Hotel in DTLA, starting at 1:00 pm through Nov. 2.

A more official public ofrenda at the Día de Los Muertos altar at the Barclay Hotel mural at 6:00 pm featured speakers including CHIRLA (Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights Los Angeles), LA Federation of Labor, SEIU, Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, Father Gregory Boyle, and Michael Weinstein. (The Barclay Hotel is located at 103 W. 4^th St., DTLA. The mural is on the rear North-facing wall.)

Michael’s official statement: “Dolores Huerta was a towering figure who embodied everything that was best about the progressive movement.

Her singular voice encompassed fighting all forms of discrimination.

AHF was so honored to have Dolores as a close friend and supporter in our struggles for renter rights and defense of our democracy.

She marched with us. We lobbied together. She rode on our Food for Health float in the Rose Parade and was to speak at our 40^th anniversary World AIDS Day event on November 30 at The Forum.

A piece of the best of us is gone, but she would have told us the fight goes on.”

Here’s just some of what Michael told me during our roughly one-hour Zoom conversation.

Michael has to separate the legend, the icon, from the person that he knew.

“What’s so singular about her was the fact that she embraced all aspects of the battle against discrimination and for people’s human rights with great energy and sincerity.

She is just a very unique figure in the world, but particularly in California. He didn’t want to think of this day coming.

At one of her birthday events, he said, “There are dog years – but there are Dolores Huerta years, given her vitality despite her age.”

But as a person, “Dolores, to me, is my friend,” Michael says. “First of all, she understood loyalty at a level that not enough people do in this day and age. You hear about the expression ‘speaking truth to power.’ But in really tangible ways, she was a conscience, because when she gets on your case about something that she knew wasn’t right….I know that she dressed down [Gov.] Gavin Newsom when he had told her that he wasn’t going to take a position in the rent control initiative, and two days later, he did.

“But in very quiet moments when she would share about her history, or she would share about a lesson she learned and give advice if I requested it – just the feeling that she exuded that you know there really wasn’t a separation between her as an individual, and her commitment to the movement, to the struggle.

“And also, she had a zest for life. She wasn’t a dour person. She was a very smiling, friendly person.”

Michael Weinstein doesn’t giggle, but if he did, it would be in the unguarded telling of a “little anecdote” about attending her last birthday celebration. He spoke during the program and, as he often does, he left when the program was over. Dolores approached one of his AHF colleagues and asked where I was.

“Susie said, ‘Oh, Michael left. And Dolores said, ‘Yeah, he’s not really a party animal, is he?’ Oh, she got that one,” Michael says, cracking up as if you had to be there.

“She was so fulsome in her praise of me, personally, and AHF, to the point where it was embarrassing, because I don’t handle compliments that well. I mean, when she was chanting ‘Viva Michael Weinstein’ at the dedication of her mural, it was embarrassing. She meant it,” Michael says, briefly hiding his face in his hands.

“I’m so happy that we dedicated that mural in her lifetime. I think it’s such a beautiful monument to her spirit. It’s a great work of art by Robert Vargas, the muralist,” Michael says, noting it’s right across from the Reagan office building, where she can keep an eye out.

“She is the conscience of the state. She’s going to be looking right in there at them, saying, ‘You do your job and be true to the cause of serving the people.’

“I hope [the mural] keeps some people’s hearts more open. Some of our cynical politicians who admired her and some of our no-good activists – pretend activists. I hope that maybe it gives them a moment to reflect on what it really means to give your life to these struggles and what it really means to be in solidarity.

“I mean, no one could be a better ally of the LGBT community,” Michael says, “because I saw her raise those issues anywhere and everywhere.”

Among the meaningful moments and funny stories, Michael says that when he closes his eyes tonight, the one thing he’ll think about Dolores Huerta is her courage.

“Courage is not the absence of fear, right? It’s doing what you have to do in the face of all your fears,” Michael says. “The last part of her life had to do with the revelation that she had been raped by Cesar Chavez. And what she told me, what she said publicly, was the fact that she wasn’t going to allow that terrible chapter to wipe out all the good that the Farm Workers Union had done.

“She made a great sacrifice keeping that secret because she did not want to see the harm to that movement,” he continues. “That was a moral dilemma that she had to cope with, and she had the strength to do it. And when the time came, she didn’t hide from it. That’s just one example of the strength that she had.”

“I found it interesting how much of an affinity she had for LGBT people,” Michael says. She had a daughter who’s a lesbian. She has other people in the family. But I think she saw the central similarity between the way that Latinos were marginalized and the way that LGBT people were also on the margins. Another genius was the ability to make these connections very understandable to people.

“Dolores was so special, so unique that I think her place in the history of all the communities she touched is well cemented,” Michael says.

While most of our conversation was about honoring Dolores Huerta, we also discussed the midterm elections.

“I voted for Nithya Raman. I was a supporter of Karen Bass,” Michael tells me. “The last four years have been very disappointing and, really have failed us as a city.”

He’s especially critical of Bass’ Inside Safe program to combat homelessness, an issue he thinks can be handled by smart legislation rather than another rent control ballot initiative.

“It was a terrible idea,” Michael says. “That’s the program that basically scoops people up and puts them in temporary motel rooms, and then a large percentage of them wind up out on the street in short order. It is not a solution. They have a very simple solution to the housing crisis. House people.”

On the other hand, “the centerpiece of Nithya’s campaign is that the city doesn’t work and it’s impossible to argue with it.”

Michael also says he voted for the Billionaires Tax. “I was very disappointed that Gov. Newsom is once again the lead attack dog against a progressive proposal. I voted against 41 and 42, which were put on by the billionaires to try to declaw Prop 40. I voted against 45, which is trying to weaken the environmental regulations.”

He’s also been watching the national trends towards Democrats possible winning majorities in Congress. And he’s very excited about this having been “a great week for freedom,” with pro-democratic victories in Serbia and Brazil, where AHF has a huge program. He’s also pleased that, while the outcome in the Israeli elections remains unclear, Trump ally Bibi Netanyahu got many fewer votes than expected.

“There’s been a fever sweeping the world in the last few years that’s put these right-wingers into power,” Michael says. “But I think that the tide has turned.”

Michael returns to Dolores Huerta. “It’s an indulgence to give up,” he says. “It’s selfish. Whether we embrace it or not, we are part of one human race. That’s what Dolores understood. We are part of one human race. And we, we’re gonna rise up together or we’re going to fall together. And I believe that love triumphs over hate.”

There is so much more that Michael Weinstein discussed which is actually an easy conversation to listen to on our video and podcast.

Also – please note that AHF is celebrating its 40^th Anniversary, featuring Ricky Martin.

This is a cross-post from Karen’s LGBTQ+ Freedom Fighters Substack.

Michael Kearns is one of those friends who, even after a decade of distance, was always just a phone call away.

Michael died on Monday night, Oct. 5. He was 76. No details or cause of death have been released, but apparently Michael had not been in the best of health.

In a condolence note to the LGBTQ+ community on Facebook, Celebration Theatre posted: “At Celebration, Michael is perhaps most remembered for his production of Robert Chesley’s JERKER. In fact, Michael was due to appear this Sunday (National Coming Out Day) in our Circa: Queer Histories Festival event “Art in the Revolution: Queer Theatre in 1982 and Today”—where he was to reprise selections from the play alongside his longtime friend and colleague Joe Gill.”

Today, a stunned gay theatre and AIDS activism world is mourning the loss of the ubiquitous and creative artist who helped so many, literally touched so many, and probably died not knowing how beloved he really was.

I met Michael Kearns in late 1989. I was a new nobody freelancer at Frontiers Magazine, and Michael called because apparently no one was interested in this new play he’d written. Someone warned me that it was probably all about gay sex and I might not like it. But it was also about AIDS, and that had become my life since 1984. So, I went to his show. Intimacies changed my life.

I don’t remember the location or what happened before or after. What I remember is watching Michael Kearns standing onstage, twirling this red scarf like a magical matador ushering us into his world of six characters as Darien Martus’ score quietly seeped into my bloodstream. These were not people from my world – and yet, their poverty of the soul, their angry loneliness, their reality-shy desperation for love and recognition felt like my world, too, even though I professed to myself that I was none of these things. And, given my pre-sobriety shenanigans, I was gratefully HIV-negative.

I went backstage and confessed I was too mesmerized to talk then. So we met for lunch at the French Market Place in West Hollywood and laughed and swooned with sudden enlightenment and shared story after story for hours. We were both born in January, 16 days apart – he was older. We were both in a 12 Step program. He liked to gossip; I was an old-school journalist. We really fell for each other through our mutual commitment to do what we could to fight AIDS.

Michael confessed that he wasn’t really the Happy Hustler, though he played one in real life – and I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. I knew people in AA and people with AIDS had their own language, but as someone who came out late, I had no idea what gay and lesbian-speak was.

I confess that even though I’d heard enough gay sex stories through AA 9^th Steps, I blushed as he explained Jerker and Dream Man – which Mark S. King says is really based on him and interviews he gave Michael’s theatrical partner, playwright James Carroll Pickett.

That’s when things got intensely intellectual and nuanced, as in Queen of Angels, which was luckily staged at Highways Performance Space – headed up by the brilliant and lovely Tim Miller – where I could go outside and catch my breath trying to figure out the Hero’s Journey.

But as extraordinary as Michael’s writing was and as riveted as I was by his acting – I still have the T-shirt featuring his performance in Charles Ludlam‘s Camille at Highways – I was a political reporter, so I had to find ways to cover him for his activism, as well as his art. Cue Artists Confronting AIDS, which Michael co-founded with Jim Pickett.

“The initial concept of AIDS/US was truly shocking: putting people who had the disease, many of whom were not well, on stage—live—to tell their stories. There were audience members who feared catching the disease from the performers,” Michael said.

Michael became a major source for journalists when explosive stories hit the news – like the death of actor Brad Davis. The 41-year-old star of the film Midnight Express died of AIDS on Sept. 8, 1991. He kept his health conditions secret for six years so he could continue to work and support his wife and child.

Two days after his death, his widow, casting director Susan Bluestein, gave the Los Angeles Times Davis’ book proposal about his struggle to work in Hollywood while secretly having AIDS. The proposal turned into an open letter charging the industry with hypocrisy, homophobia, and AIDSphobia.

Michael felt the crisis would be cathartic, serving as a “real turning point” that could yield jobs. And it served as an opportunity for him to come out as being HIV/positive.

On Sept. 16, Michael told NBC correspondent Faith Daniels that he was HIV positive.

“I felt that not one more HIV-infected actor or anyone else should die in shame,” Michael told me for an article in the Sept. 19, 1991 issue of the Bay Area Reporter. “I’m doing this for all people with HIV. HIV is nothing to be ashamed of. For me to remain silent indicates shame or fear on some level. Taking my cue from Brad Davis, I couldn’t remain silent.”

He added: “This is really revolutionary what’s going on. There’s no way I can’t be a part of it.”

And he was. “There seems to be this expectation that Hollywood should be more evolved than the rest of the world. But Hollywood is less evolved. They focus on the lowest common denominator, particularly in television, which assumes the viewer is homophobic, racist, sexist, and stupid.”

Michael blamed “the relative invisibility of gay themes in Hollywood’s film and TV product, as well as the lack of openly gay actors, let alone openly HIV-positive ones–on ‘self-hatred’ by gays in the industry who are ‘closeted,’” The Times reported.

Michael eventually came out about his 1983 unprotected sexual encounter with actor Rock Hudson, which he was certain resulted in him contracting HIV/AIDS. And, of course, that resulted in another play about homophobia and art.

“Rock was a classic victim,” Michael, tagged as “the only openly gay actor in Hollywood,” told the LA Times in 1992. “He was a victim of this town, of alcohol, of his looks, of the system, of his own publicity. In many ways he was the opposite of me.”

Michael also noted how little had changed after Brad Davis’ AIDS death. “I felt a deep kinship with Brad,” he said of disclosing his own HIV status. “Then the media comes to me, and I’m saying the same things I said six years ago with Rock. Nothing’s changed. There’s been fund-raising and consciousness-raising by heterosexual female stars, but the more subtle, insidious fear has increased.”

Being HIV positive, Michael said in 1992, before the miracle drugs, “makes me prioritize things. And I’ve never been low on the passion scale. Has it made me more passionate to know that my days may be numbered, that there may not be many more opening nights? Of course! So, yes, part of it is good. It’s no different than anyone who has an incredible obstacle and makes something beautiful out of it.”

But Hollywood is still “a scalding cauldron of collusion,” Michael told me.

“What’s troubling is that a number of Hollywood powerbrokers treat homosexuality as a ‘sin’ or ‘immoral’ or an ‘abnormality’ that somehow is to be hidden; they categorize it as a career killer which could result in a loss of box office billing or revenue,” he said. “But they have skin in the game (usually financial), so they collude. They lie, betray, falsify; they are the immoral ones.”

When actor Kevin Spacey was “trolling the halls at Burke Williams, camouflaging himself by putting the hood of his bathrobe up over his head, he was not exactly embracing his gayness,” Michael said. “And when he got in the massage room, alone with the masseur, Spacey insisted on positioning himself for something other than a ‘legit massage.’ Is that harassment? It occurred enough times, according to my very reliable source, that he was thrown out of the West Hollywood location and relegated to Santa Monica (where there were more issues reported). Even in this case, Spacey was being protected by moving him rather than really confronting this issue. Collusion.”

There’s so much more to consider about Michael Kearns – like his love for Philip Juwig. I attended their casual wedding and went to Sherman Oaks Medical Center with Michael before Philip died in 1992.

And I talked with him a lot about his desire to be a father. A lot of his friends, including me, thought it would be virtually impossible for a single, gay, HIV positive man to be “allowed” to adopt. But he did. And he was so happy with his little baby Tia that he brought her to Paul Monette’s memorial at the Directors Guild to show her off. It was close to a spiritual full-circle moment.

Over the years, I became a news editor and had my own blog – LGBT POV – and always tried to make space for Michael’s contributions. One about his daughter Tia – who renamed herself Katherine – is the essay “Bloodless but not Loveless,” which is part of a larger collection entitled What I Would Tell Her: 28 Devoted Dads on Bringing Up, Holding On To, and Letting Go of Their Daughters, edited by Andrea N. Richesin.

“You are my family,” Tia/Katherine says. She reminds me of the many individuals—gay, straight, young, old, black, white, rich, poor—who have helped me raise her since she and I embarked on this journey together.”

This is what I’ll remember: for Michael Kearns, it’s always been about love. And a good laugh.

This is a cross-post from Karen’s LGBTQ+ Freedom Fighters Substack.

I don’t want to say goodbye.

To be honest, my first impression of music icon Dolly Parton was similar to the scathing look the demur Jane Fonda gave the boss’s secretary in one of my favorite funny feminist films ever, 9 to 5.

Fonda’s aghast up-and-down scrutiny was pure unspoken tisk-tisk condescension toward this bubbly dumb-blond wigged white trash colleague – until she looked down at her own flat chest. For a moment, Fonda suggested a hint of envy, at which we laughed. I felt a sigh of relief at not having to carry around all the weight Dolly Parton’s boobs implied.

Those boobs, those big blond country-Western wigs, and her seemingly irrepressible humor were as much a part of Dolly Parton’s brand as was her incomparable voice and the songs she wrote that moved generations. In 1974, I longed to love someone as much as Dolly loved the person for whom she wrote her goodbye, “I Will Always Love You.”

Surely, someone with that big a heart was bigger than the tight bodice society forced innovative go-getters like Dolly Parton to squeeze into.

In fact, Parton’s difficult backstory of childhood poverty in Sevierville, Tenn., living in a cabin with no running water and 11 siblings – and an ambition infused with a love-your-neighbor Christian upbringing -created a depth of character that used smarts, ingenuity and humor to thwart her stereotype-blinded detractors.

“Well, I graduated [high school] on a Friday night and headed out on a Saturday morning,” Parton told ABC News’ Robin Roberts in an extensive interview in advance of the 2019 CMA Awards. “As I make jokes about it with my matching luggage, those four paper bags from the same grocery store. I thought, well, I can’t be any poorer than I already am, and I’m a girl. I’ll find some boy that’ll take me to Shoney’s… I thought I’m not going to go hungry.”

Like Billie Jean King and other female professionals, Dolly Parton fought hard to get paid what she was worth.

“It’s not all about money,” she said. “I count my blessings more than I count my money, but I need to count my money, too.”

Tough times taught her how to be tough and funny. “Well, I don’t think people can live in this world without going through times like that,” Parton told Roberts. “People always look at me; they always say, ‘Oh, you just always seem to be so happy.’ I said, ‘That’s the Botox.’ No, but seriously, I’m a very sensitive person. I feel everything to the core.”

That’s what makes her famous 1977 interview with ABC’s Barbara Walters so compelling. Walters had become infamous for making her interview subjects cry after asking tough, prying, sometimes rude questions that she said her audience wanted answered.

“You don’t have to look like this; you’re very beautiful. You don’t have to wear the blonde wigs; you don’t have to wear the extreme clothes, right?” Walters asked the brightly dressed Parton.

Parton delivered a master class in grace and class.

“It’s certainly a choice,” Parton replied. “I don’t like to be like everybody else. I’ve often made the statement that I would never stoop so low as to be fashionable. That’s the easiest thing in the world to do.”

Chuckling yet? Parton wanted attention, then she could dazzle them with talent. “Once they got past the shock of the ridiculous way I looked, then they would see there’s parts of me to be appreciated. I’m very real where it counts…and that’s inside,” Dolly Parton told Barbara Walters. “Show business is a money-making joke, and I just always like telling jokes.”

Walters then asked Parton – the beloved star with 19 studio albums and a slew of awards won over a decade in the male-dominated music business: “Do you ever feel like you’re a joke, that people make fun of you?”

Parton was the personification of composure.

“I know they make fun of me. But actually, all these years people have thought the joke was on me, but it’s actually been on the public. I know exactly what I’m doing, and I can change it at any time. I make more jokes about myself than anybody,” Parton said.

“I am sure of myself as a person. I am sure of my talent. I’m sure of my love for life,” Parton said. “And I’m very content. I like the kind of person that I am. So I can afford to piddle around and do-diddle around with make-up and clothes and stuff. Because I am secure with myself.”

Game, set, match to Parton.

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In another ABC interview in 2012, Parton expanded on that over-the-top signature style which she adopted after seeing the town trollop.

“There was this woman, we won’t call her names, but she was beautiful,” she told ABC News Nightline. “I had never seen anybody, you know, with the yellow hair all piled up and the red lipstick and the rouge and the high-heeled shoes, and I thought, ‘This is what I want to look like.’”

As the image implies, there were constant rumors that she was secretly involved with any male within inches – as well as a secret lesbian life with her oldest childhood pal, Judy Ogle. She denied the rumor – she was married to Carl Dean for 58 years. He died in March 2025.

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Dolly Parton died peacefully on Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2026, at the age of 80 in Nashville after a “brief battle with cancer,” her team wrote in a statement to People.

“Our beloved Dolly Parton spent her life and career bringing joy, laughter, hope, and integrity into everything she touched. Her unmatched generosity reached the lives of countless people whom she would never meet, yet she was always there to offer a helping hand,” they wrote.

“Whether it be the hundreds of millions of books donated through her invaluable Imagination Library or funding research that helped create a lifesaving vaccine used around the world, Dolly’s unconditional love for all people was the guiding force for her lasting impact. After bravely facing a brief battle with cancer, Dolly departed her Earthly life today at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, surrounded by loved ones,” the statement concluded.

The music world is in mourning. And news outlets are overflowing with tributes. Few of them mention us. In fact, one note of criticism for some is a precise example of that “unconditional love for all people” her team talked about.

“The ’80s — a decade she kicked off in grand fashion with the working woman’s anthem ‘9 to 5’ — brought Parton some of her greatest mainstream success, but the climate of the times also conspired to reduce her to a punchline and a caricature: The self-made country-pop queen who had pulled herself up by her bra straps. She played along, as an act of self-preservation, but it is a consolation to know that she lived long enough for her reputation as a songwriter to rise considerably in the 21st century,” Lindsay Zoladz wrote in her “appraisal” of Dolly Parton, who “had the Voice, and Concerns, of an Earth Angel” for the New York Times.

Damn, bitch! Have you never even seen a Dolly Parton drag queen? There’s almost a cottage industry devoted to Dolly. And Dolly knew – and loved it! She even participated in a Dolly Parton drag contest at a gay LA Bar – which she lost!

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“They had a bunch of Chers and Dollys that year, so I just over-exaggerated — made my beauty mark bigger, the eyes bigger, the hair bigger, everything,” Parton laughingly told ABC News Nightline. “All these beautiful drag queens had worked for weeks and months getting their clothes. So I just got in the line, and I just walked across, and they just thought I was some little short gay guy… but I got the least applause.”

Dolly Parton lost the Dolly Parton look-alike contest in an LA gay bar! But she hasn’t lost the ineffable connection to her fans – whom she understood, felt, and fought for – including protecting “Gay Day” at Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tenn.

“When it first started, there were people giving us threats; I still get threats,” Parton told ABC News. “But like I said, I’m in business. I just don’t feel like I have to explain myself. I love everybody.”

That’s what I saw when Dolly Parton arrived and smiled through an onslaught of paparazzi and gay fanboys at an APLA Commitment to Life event.

Oddly though, as a reporter, my fixation was on Parton’s “date,” her gay manager Sandy Gallin, who seemed to rarely show up publicly with his supposed posse, controversially dubbed the “Velvet Gay Mafia.”

The late gay AIDS advocate Dana Miller, who was on the APLA Board, wrote a piece for In Los Angeles Magazine about the Four Warriors of AIDS fundraising: David Geffen, Barry Diller, Sandy Gallin, and Jeffrey Katzenberg.

“It was the early ’90s, and we were in the second decade of AIDS with absolutely no hope in sight,” Miller wrote. “It was then I discovered the warriors, and it was amazing. Gay and straight, they were the ones who for almost a decade came together in living rooms and storefronts to provide what our government didn’t. My list of warriors is long, yet this is the tale of four particular individuals who, for years, I closely watched working behind the scenes to make a difference in the quality of life of men, women, and children they would never know.”

After Gallin died in 2017 at age 76, columnist Billy Masters wrote a tribute in the Los Angeles Blade that expanded on that theme – and included a section on Dolly Parton, with whom he formed Sandollar Productions in 1985. Sandollar Productions, with Howard Rosenman, produced the 1990 Oscar winning documentary Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt that raised global awareness about AIDS.

“While Gallin’s client list was vast and varied, he especially loved his divas. A special place in his heart was reserved solely for Dolly Parton. The two met after Dolly asked singer Mac Davis who should help with her career. Davis said, ‘You should talk to Sandy Gallin — he’s my manager.’ Sandy had one goal — to make Dolly a mainstream star. The first thing he did was set up a recording session for the song ‘Here You Come Again,’”Masters wrote.

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“Dolly was hesitant. She said, ‘A monkey could sing this song and have a hit with it.’ She was very nervous that it would turn off the country market, which she was very loyal to.’ Gallin made a deal with her — if the song wasn’t No. 1 on the pop charts AND the country charts, he’d never get involved in her musical decisions again. Dolly took the deal — and lost,” Masters wrote. “From then on, she and Sandy were inseparable. They considered each other beyond best friends and almost soul mates. ‘My husband didn’t love to travel, and Sandy was gay, and he did,’ said Dolly.”

Dolly Parton also talked about Gallin in an interview with Apple Music Country’s Proud Radio: “Sandy and I just clicked like nobody’s business,” Parton told host Hunter Kelly. “He was like my best gay bud. … We [went to] Studio 54. We’d sit on the couch and watch all the craziness. But we were all involved in the fun of it, and it was great.”

“I really owe him so much,” Parton added.

But, contrary to what Dolly Parton sings in “9 to 5,” it’s not all taking and no giving. Dolly Parton told the KKK that she welcomes gay people to Dollywood. And in 1991, when gay men were dying of AIDS by the thousands, and some Southern Christian leaders said AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexuality, Dolly Parton wrote and sang one of the first country songs to include “gay” and Christianity: “Some are preachers, some are gay… But not a one is turned away when it’s family.”

She later got an Oscar nod for “Travelin’ Thru,” a song for the transgender film “Transamerica.”

In 2023, after her home state of Tennessee passed anti-trans and anti-drag laws, Parton said she knew how deeply it hurt LGBTQ+ people, including in her own family and life, to be attacked for who they are.

“I know and love them all, and I do not judge,” she said. “They cannot help that any more than I can help being Dolly Parton.”

By the end of “9 to 5,” I realized that I had been the judgmental one with stereotype-blinders. I enjoyed learning how to get bold things done while expressing yourself with authentic joy. But unfortunately the theme and song are still applicable today.

Thank you, Dolly Parton.

The superlative does not exist to describe Michael Silverblatt’s passion hosting KCRW’s Bookworm, which the New York Times described as a “literary salon of the air.” Michael died from complications of diabetes at his Fairfax district home on Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day. He was 73.

Many, many famous writers and artists have described their appreciation for Michael’s unique, insightful depth of literary knowledge. Norman Mailer called Michael “the best reader in America.” Susan Sontag called him “a national treasure.”  Joyce Carol Oates called him “the very Mozart of literary interviewers.” 

“Michael was a genius. He could be mesmerizing and always, always, always brilliant,” Alan Howard, Michael’s friend and Bookworm editor for 31 of the show’s 33 years, told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s an extraordinary archive that exists, and I don’t think anyone else has ever created such an archive of intelligent, interesting people being asked about their work.”

A curious twist of fate landed Michael in what turned out to be his own wonderland, conducting more than 1,600 interviews with brilliant writers and artists such as Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood, Ann Beattie, Kurt Vonnegut, Salman Rushdie, Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe, Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, and David Foster Wallace.

Michael was born in Brooklyn, New York, on Aug. 6, 1952, and raised in Queens by parents who were two accountants – children of Russian and Polish immigrants who didn’t quite know what to do with their reclusive, budding gay, Jewish intellect.

“My first crucial book was Alice in Wonderland. My mom used to take me with her to the beauty parlor, and I asked her to get me the big Walt Disney Alice in Wonderland with the colored pictures because it was so pretty and mysterious to me. I remember the Cheshire cat, pink and purple with a heckler’s smile,” Michael told Sarah Fay during an interview at the University of Iowa in 2010. “My mother instead bought me the Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with the black and white Tenniel engravings, and I was very disappointed. She did it not because she had a particular investment in literature but because the Disney was so much more expensive and we were always mindful of our economy. 

“And when I finally read it,” he continues, “it took me a good two years—I was absolutely fascinated and perturbed by it, particularly by the section where Alice finds herself in the wood where nothing has a name, and she doesn’t know her own name. The engraving has Alice in the woods with her arms around the neck of a fawn, not strangling the fawn, but embracing it as if for dear life, or as if she doesn’t know if she is a fawn, too. The mystery of reading all of those poems that made less sense if you didn’t know the popular poems they were parodies of made it even stranger. I was absolutely entranced by Alice and Lewis Carroll.”

Through Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic and The Game of Logic, Michael taught himself logic and math. “I developed quite a proficiency for abstract math.”

Intellectual challenges became games when, in junior high, Stephen Sondheim published “Cryptic Crosswords” in New York magazine, and Michael would “enter the words as a knight would move across a chessboard.” 

As “[Donald] Barthelme has his Snow White character say in his first novel (1967), I want to hear words I have never heard before. I want the words and sentences to peacock around, to open their plumes,” Michael told Fay. “I have an experience of the book, and it’s as if I have not a flat surface in front of me but rather a beehive around my head. It’s very strange.” 

In 1968, after graduating from Bayside High School at age 16, Michael enrolled in SUNY at Buffalo, where authors such as Michel Foucault, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and J.M. Coetzee were professors. Michael was awkward, shy, and inhibited by a stammer – but he secretly considered the professors friends and spoke with them after class. 

During summer vacation, his parents pushed him to be a postal worker with a mail route on the Upper East Side that took him past old bookstores. He subsequently bought the complete works of Charles Dickens while his literary tastes were also expanding to the experimental and avant-garde.

Michael refused to major in business, choosing math as a compromise.  But he quickly switched to English, graduating with a BA in 1974.  He went for a PhD at Johns Hopkins University but dropped out after a year, paralyzed by writer’s block. “I thought I wanted to be a writer, but that really didn’t turn out to be my gift,” Michael told Kristy Davis for Oprah.com.  

After a screenplay he co-wrote received some Hollywood attention, Michael relocated to Los Angeles to pursue his dream of writing scripts and books. But the script wasn’t picked up, and he found himself lost, broke, jobless, and drinking a lot. “At the time,” he told Davis, “I resembled a homeless person who unaccountably had an apartment.” 

Michael found a 12 Step program, and his life changed. Friends helped him learn how to take care of himself and found him a job at Freeman & Sutton Public Relations in West Hollywood. 

That’s where I met Michael in the mid-80s. Brad Bessey, Michael, and I became the gay troika in that office. I was a fellow 12 Stepper, so Brad and I helped brainiac Michael with living in the real world – like cleaning up crumbs. Showbiz-sharp Brad helped Michael and me with the who’s who in Hollywood. And I learned how to write spin-filled press releases about “causes” like I used to read as a journalist. 

“We were odd friends,” Brad remembers about Michael. “Back in the mid-eighties, we met in the glittering churn of celebrity PR. I was young, handsome, brash, and built for the room. Michael, on the other hand, was quieter and a little awkward—as if words lived more comfortably on the page than in the room. I loved his laugh, his intellect, and the way, when I trusted him with my poetry—shared with few—he met it with tenderness: an encouraging question, a precise insight, never once making me feel small. When he landed KCRW’s Bookworm, it felt like a metamorphosis—awkwardness transforming into flight—his brilliance suddenly finding a home, audible at last, lifting literature into the air. And always, that laugh.” 

We three broke up in the late 80s: I went to live with Wallis Annenberg in Beverly Hills, intending to write plays; Brad wound up as E!’s Director of Talent & Development where he resurrected Joan Rivers career by putting her on the red carpet; then on to Entertainment Tonight where he encouraged actor Michael Jeter to come out in 1997 as a gay man with HIV/AIDS, and highlighted transgender actor Alexis Arquette.   

In 1988, Michael had a famous encounter at dinner in Santa Monica, where he was representing actor Ray Sharkey (Wiseguy). He overheard KCRW’s general manager, Ruth Seymour, talking about Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, a victim of one of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s.

“I had just gotten back from Russia, and we were at this dinner with an actor, a producer, and a director who were talking Hollywood,” Seymour told Lynell George for a 3,596-word LA Times feature on Michael in 1997. “And Michael and I got into this whole discussion about Russian poetry, talking to the exclusion of everyone else. He’s a great raconteur, and so the rest of the world just vanished….So afterward I just turned and asked him: ‘Have you ever thought about doing radio?’”

Soon thereafter, Michael started volunteering as host for Bookworm on KCRW, a public radio station on the campus of Santa Monica College. Five years later, thanks to enthusiastic Lannan Foundation support, he was paid, treated like royalty on college campuses and other venues for the special Lannan Foundation “Readings and Conversations” series, and became syndicated nationally.  

“The purpose of the show is to help my listeners look through writers’ eyes,” Michael told The New York Times in 1999.“It’s to show them, whether they’re reading or not, how writers re-enchant the world, how they surround us with the miraculous. That’s what books do to me and what I want my show to do, to remind people how odd and special writers’ minds and imaginations are.”

But Michael also cared about public relations, as he shared with his friend Tosh Berman in this 1987 interview. “For people like me, wearing a sports jacket [for PR work] is like the best rebellion of all,” Michael says. “It’s like wearing a clown suit every single day – and enjoying the formality of it, too. The great joy, as William Burrows pointed out, is to feel completely costumed and to be absolutely anonymous.”

“I care about deeply serious writing in America – dance, art. Why should all sorts of less valuable forms be winning attention in the press and the media when the arts languish in need of budgets and government funds,” he says. “This is very important – that we have a government that supports the arts.  But it’s more important that we have a culture that supports the arts.” 

However, it needs to be created. “I think it is there but very embryonically,” Michael says. “That’s the kind of thing I’m interested in doing – in helping the arts reach their audience and making that audience aware that, like an addiction to drugs – there are those of us who are art addicts – whose lives are changed by the brilliant people who make new things, new forms, new forms of culture.” 

One of Michael’s most famous interviews was with David Foster Wallace in 1996 after the publication of Wallace’s 1078-page ultimate mega-meta novel Infinite Jest. Michael immediately stuns the author by observing that the book was written and structured in fractals. After an awe-struck Wallace agrees and explains, Michael goes deeper. 

“[W]e’re entering a world that needs to be made strange before it becomes familiar,” he says. Infinite Jest isn’t difficult “for difficulty’s sake; it seemed like immense difficulty being expended because something important about how difficult it has become to be human needed to be said, and there weren’t other ways to say that.” 

Wallace is heard quietly saying, “I feel like I wanna ask you to adopt me.” 

Over the years, Michael’s vision becomes clearer. “There are all sorts of other things that you get on radio and television,” he told Oprah.com in 2009, “but I wanted listeners of Bookworm to hear words, ideas, but particularly emotions that don’t get discussed in public, if at all elsewhere. That is to say, for one reason or another, the show is a crusade that’s much larger than the subject of books.”

That includes books by and about LGBTQ+ people. In a 2006 interview, Brokeback Mountain author Annie Proulx shares how Ang Lee’s film Brokeback Mountain reflects her vision that the main romantic characters of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist are not traditional “cowboys” but poor ranch hands in 1963 rural Wyoming. She’s also annoyed with gay fans who have inundated her with alternative “happy” endings.  

In an introduction to his 2014 interview about Hilton Als’ book, Michael writes: “White Girls (McSweeney’s), his first book in 14 years, is a series of essays that defy easy categorization – in each he takes the risk to say what must be said. Countering books that define ‘blackness’ in the title like Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Als, a black gay male, is interested in making words opaque. He chronicles longing, loss of loved ones, and the establishment of his voice in the New York of the late ’80s and ’90s. He looks back to Richard Pryor and forward to Eminem. His ‘white girls’ are neither necessarily girls nor white. They are Diana Vreeland, Michael Jackson, Truman Capote, and Louise Little. He posits: what if we existed in a world that was not categorizable?’ Wouldn’t we be left with something more humane and complicated?”

Michael is keenly aware of the importance of identity. 

“A book about English children in a castle,” he tells the LA Times, “that was the training, when I was young, to imagine a world that didn’t include me. Books and television are our cultural mirrors… and when you look into the mirror, and you don’t see your face, this is possibly a nightmare situation–the act of looking but not finding yourself, or looking and finding yourself where you don’t belong. So until I found books that had a Michael in them, part of me didn’t fully yet exist.”

Finding an image was also startling. “When I learned that there were [such] books–Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Henry Roth, that generation of Jewish writers–my first impulse was to resist. ‘This isn’t the castle!’ I was frightened. It was the language I heard around the house. If you’re any kind of minority, to open a book and hear the people around you, your aunts and uncles talking to you . . . that that language should be in a book? I mean, this is an enormous day!”

In 2005, Michael and his team produced a 10-part series entitled Escaping the Cage: Identity, Multiculturalism and Writing, playing off Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings about the human desire to make one’s voice heard even when shackled. Michael “inverted the concept: Writers of defined backgrounds — such as ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation — can become imprisoned by it, he believes, an effect of everything from publishers’ marketing strategies to the editing decisions of anthologists,” The Times reported. 

“The cage became the cage of ethnicity,” Silverblatt said. “People were being asked to see literature as entirely a matter of identity…. People were not being allowed to be writers. They were being turned into spokespeople.”

Part 6 is devoted to Sexuality and Literary Theory:  “James McCourt discusses the emergence of ‘queer identity’ and gives an overview of French literary theories and their influence on multiculturalism–while Camille Paglia explains the destructive nature of such theories. Booker Prize winner Alan Hollinghurst, who writes about the gay experience, reveals that he reads very little popular gay literature. Edmund White explains how he has turned away from the aesthetic and has embraced social realism in his desire to document the AIDS crisis.”

Author John Rechy, famous for the 1963 gay classic City of Night, wrote a letter to Michael agreeing with his premise. Quoting from one of his essays, he writes: “There is a counterattack by the `mainstream’ to consider. One of its main tactics to effect that countering is through the creation of `liberated ghettos’. When book-chains assign labeled sections to `Chicano literature,’ `Gay Literature,’ `Women’s Studies,’ they segregate. So do `mainstream’ publishers who aim minority books only at minorities and who promote such works, if at all, with restricted advertising.” Brad Bessey is now the director of Communications and Talent Relations at Project Angel Food, where he used to volunteer in 1989. And after 46 years as a journalist for the LGBTQ+ community, I am now writing a Substack called LGBTQ+ Freedom Fighters.

And Michael – he found loving friends, deep admiration, and captured his dream. “I’m as fantastical a creature as anything in Oz or in Wonderland,” he told the Cornell University English department in 2010. “I like it if people can say, ‘I never met anyone like him,’ and by that they should mean that it wasn’t an unpleasant experience.” 

I never met anyone like him.

This tribute to Michael Silverblatt is cross-posted from Karen Ocamb’s Substack LGBTQ+ Freedom Fighters.

Catherine O’Hara, the varied comedic actor known for memorable roles in Beetlejuice, Schitt’s Creek, and Home Alone, has died at 71 on Friday, Jan. 30, according to multiple reports. No further details about her death were revealed.

O’Hara’s death comes as a shock to Hollywood, as the Emmy award-winning actor has been recently active, with roles in both The Studio and The Last of Us. For her work in those two shows, she received Emmy nominations for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series and outstanding guest actress in a drama series.

In 2020, O’Hara won the Outstanding Lead Actress in a comedy series award for her work in the celebrated sixth and final season of Schitt’s Creek. She was also known as a queer ally and icon for her theatrical and often campy performances over multiple decades. In Schitt’s Creek, she played Moira Rose, the wig-loving mother of David Rose (played by series creator Dan Levy). David is pansexual, but the characters around him simply accept him for who he is; the show was embraced by the LGBTQ+ community with how naturally David’s sexuality was written and portrayed. That show ran from 2015 to 2020 and helped bring O’Hara and her co-stars into a new phase of their careers.

In a 2019 interview with the Gay Times, O’Hara explained why the show got LGBTQ+ representation right: “Daniel has created a world that he wants to live in, that I want to live in. It’s ridiculous that we live in a world where we don’t know how to respect each other and let each other be. It’s crazy. Other shows should follow suit and present the world and present humans as the best that we can be. It doesn’t mean you can’t laugh, that you can’t be funny in light ways and dark ways. It’s all still possible when you respect and love each other.”

Additional credits include SCTV Network (for which O’Hara won a writing Emmy), Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, Best in Show, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and Dick Tracy. O’Hara also lent her voice to The Nightmare Before Christmas, Chicken Little, Monster House, and Elemental. O’Hara was expected to return for Season 2 of The Studio, which started filming earlier this month.

Wallis Annenberg, who passed away shortly after her 86th birthday on July 28th, left behind a legacy that few philanthropists of any era could hope to match. A passionate leader, cultural patron, and unapologetically generous force in Los Angeles, she spent her life championing creativity, compassion, and community. But what often went unsaid, sometimes politely ignored, was that Wallis was also a queer pioneer. In a world that didn’t always make room for women like her, she quietly yet courageously carved out space not just for herself, but for others on the margins, channeling her power and privilege into building a more inclusive world.

Born into one of America’s most influential media families, Wallis Annenberg was raised in Philadelphia with ink practically in her veins. Her father, Walter Annenberg, founded TV Guide and Seventeen, and built a philanthropic legacy as prominent as his publishing empire. After graduating from Pine Manor College in 1959, Wallis dipped a toe into the family business at TV Guide before eventually diving headfirst into the deeper waters of philanthropy. It wasn’t until her father’s death in 2002 that she properly took the reins, steering the Annenberg Foundation into its most impactful era as President and CEO from 2009 until her passing.

Under her leadership, the Foundation funneled a staggering $1.5 billion into a wildly diverse portfolio of causes, from arts and culture to environmental conservation, journalism to gerontology, and yes, even animal overpasses. Her imprint on Los Angeles is practically architectural – the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, GenSpace in Koreatown, PetSpace for animal lovers, the ambitious Wildlife Crossing set to open in 2026, and the science-sparking Annenberg Building at the California Science Center. Her boardroom resume reads like a cultural tour of LA and then some – USC, LACMA, MOCA, the Philharmonic, the Music Center, and Harlem Children’s Zone, to name just a few. In 2022, President Joe Biden awarded her the National Humanities Medal, sealing her place in history as part of the only three-generation family to earn such a distinction, further proof that giving back wasn’t just in the Annenberg bloodline but a full-fledged dynasty.

Most obituaries have captured her vast philanthropic footprint, her roles in the public sphere, and her institutional endowments quite accurately yet have almost entirely glossed over or minimized a central truth: Wallis Annenberg lived as a lesbian woman, and openly supported LGBTQ+ and HIV/AIDS causes with strategically courageous generosity.

To fully and properly honor Wallis is to acknowledge not only her generational wealth and philanthropic vision but also her very much so queer identity: a lesbian woman whose visibility was moderately limited by her time and place yet meaningful when and where it counted. Her sexuality and identity shaped her empathy toward marginalized people. 

Ignoring that part of her story perpetuates the ever-constant sanitization of queer public figures, simplifying them into neutered benefactors while erasing the very identity that informed the bulk of their charitable giving. Wallis’s lived experience as a lesbian deserves proper and public acknowledgment not merely as a footnote but as integral to her philanthropy, her community care, and her story – a story layered with courage, complexity, and an undertone of quiet and careful defiance.

Wallis faced addiction head-on, and the recovery journey didn’t just save her – it connected her to journalist Karen Ocamb, who became to Wallis a close companion and confidante. Wallis didn’t shy away from vulnerability and fueled that same vulnerable energy into generosity, building a philanthropic approach shaped by her experience rather than detachment. 

Among the many tributes after her passing, it was only Ocamb who celebrated and honored Wallis’ sexuality with clarity and care. In her heartfelt Substack tribute, Ocamb wrote, “Wallis never came out – but she lived out loud, fiercely loving women and channeling her passion into transformative giving.”

Back in 1985, when AIDS was still drenched in stigma and so many people, including health professionals, kept their distance, Wallis stepped forward to co-chair the Commitment to Life dinner. That decision was in no way a headline grab but most certainly was a risk on her part for the time. In a day and age when silence was safest when protecting one’s reputation, Wallis chose to speak out through action. Her courage didn’t need a spotlight. It simply showed up where it mattered most.

Navigating public life came with its own choreography. Wallis maintained what some might call “strategic privacy,” presenting a heteronormative front in certain circles while sharing her life, deeply and authentically, with women in more trusted spaces. It wasn’t about hiding but surviving the era she lived in, and, like so many others, choosing when and how to live freely.

Wallis brought that same intentional care to her philanthropy. While major media celebrated her support for the arts, education, and conservation, far less attention was paid to her contributions to LGBTQ+ elder communities. Initiatives like Gay and Lesbian Elder Housing made a genuine, tangible difference in people’s lives, even if her name wasn’t always highlighted in the coverage.

And through it all, there was Kris Levine—Wallis’s steadfast partner, legally acknowledged near the end of Wallis’s life but largely absent from obituaries. Their relationship, though rarely publicized, was integral. It stood as one more example of how much of Wallis’s real story lived just beneath the surface.

Wallis reshaped what philanthropy could look like. Her leadership turned the Annenberg Foundation toward place-based investments, inclusive community programs, aging and wellness initiatives, and bold infrastructure like GenSpace and the Wallis Center. Her vision made space not just for ideas, but for people too often overlooked. Her presence sent a message, whether spoken or not, that queer women, especially those of her generation, have always helped shape the culture, even when they weren’t given a slot up at the mic. 

Wallis Annenberg leaves behind more than just her sprawling physical legacy. She also leaves us with a moral legacy grounded in generosity extended to communities she truly and deeply cared for, in particular the queer community that she was very much so part of. Let us all remember Wallis not only as a philanthropist, but as a queer woman whose identity was at the epicenter of her compassion. Let this tribute stand as an acknowledgment that she was more than her institutions. She was human, nuanced, hidden, and honest. And let it serve as an invitation to future remembrances. I more than dare you to include the truth of sexuality, the courage of love, and the quiet acts of resistance that defined her.

Wallis Annenberg, may your spirit continue to guide all communities – arts, aging, wildlife, and LGBTQ+ – toward a world that you helped shape for the better. Your gifts were vast. Your love was real. And your full story deserves telling.

Jewel’s Catch One nightclub, affectionately referred to by locals as “The Catch,” has been a vital part of the queer and Black communities since its opening in 1973. It was one of the first Black discos in the US, and the first major Black queer bar in Los Angeles. At its helm was pioneer Jewel Thais-Williams, the first Black woman to own an LGBTQ club in the nation. Jewel passed away on July 7^th, as confirmed by her sister Carol Williams; she was 86 years old.

Thais-Williams was born in Gary, Indiana, and was brought to San Diego after her family members were drafted into the Navy and stationed in San Diego. After high school, she attended UCLA. Seeing the limited possibilities available to Black women, she believed the only way to acquire wealth was to open her own business, and she started a dress shop with her sister.

She came into her sexuality in her mid-twenties and identified as a lesbian. She experienced firsthand the discrimination towards Black folk at gay clubs and purchased the Diana Club in the Arlington Heights district. She renamed it Jewel’s Catch One, and made history. At the time, women couldn’t tend bar unless they owned it.

After proving herself to the nightclub community, Catch One became a thriving safe space for the queer and Black communities. It also became a go-to spot for celebrity performers, with Janet Jackson, Donna Summer, Whitney Houston, Rick James, Madonna, and more.

Thais-Williams wasn’t just a bar owner; she was an activist. During the AIDS epidemic, she made Catch One available for community meetings. She also served on the board of the AIDS Project LA, co-founded the Minority AIDS Project, and co-founded Rue’s House, providing a safe space for women with AIDS and their children.

During her reign at Catch One, she went back to school and got a Master of Science degree in Oriental Medicine from Samra University. This inspired her to open the Village Health Foundation, a non-profit with a mission to educate lower-income communities on nutrition and healthy living.

Thais-Williams served as the Grand Marshal for the 2016 Los Angeles Pride Festival. In 2019, the intersection directly in front of Catch One was renamed as Jewel Thais-Williams Square. There have been two documentaries paying homage to Thais-Williams and her club, Jewel and the Catch, and Jewel’s Catch One. Footage from Jewel and the Catch was used in the opening sequence of season 3 of Amazon’s Transparent.

This last weekend, Los Angeles Blade was present at Catch One as it served as host to some of the tentpole events of Los Angeles Blade Pride. Executive Director Brandon Anthony shared this statement with the Blade:

With the devastating news of the passing of Jewel Thais-Williams, we honor a true icon and pioneer whose legacy shaped the soul of Los Angeles. For over 40+ years, she stood as a beacon for the LGBTQ community. CATCH ONE offered refuge during the AIDS epidemic, creating safe spaces when none existed, and championed Los Angeles Black Pride with unwavering love, support, and commitment. Her light made room for all of us to shine, and her legacy will forever live on through the mission of LA Black Pride.

California State Assembly member Rick Chavez Zbur also shared this statement:

I’m deeply saddened by the passing of Jewel Thais-Williams—an icon, a trailblazer, and a matriarch of Los Angeles’ Black LGBTQ+ community. Through Jewel’s Catch One, she created a haven of joy and resistance, and through her advocacy, she brought healing to communities devastated by HIV/AIDS. While leading EQCA, I was honored to present her with our Community Leadership Award in 2018. Her legacy lives on in every life she touched. She will be missed.

Catch One’s Instagram posted:

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A post shared by Catch One (@catchonela)

A celebration of her life at Catch One is anticipated; details to follow.

Nanette Kazaoka, a well-known figure in the fight for HIV/AIDS awareness and the rights of marginalized communities, passed away on Oct. 2 at her home in New York City. She was 83. The cause of death was complications from vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, according to a statement from her daughter Kelly Kochendorfer.

Kazaoka was an advocate for justice, particularly in the early days of the AIDS crisis, when she became a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT-Up. She is perhaps best remembered for her participation in a 2004 protest in front of Madison Square Garden during the Republican National Convention, when she and 11 fellow activists staged a dramatic naked demonstration, demanding debt cancellation for impoverished countries, according to a statement from the family. 

“Bush, Stop AIDS. Drop the Debt Now!” they chanted, with slogans stenciled in black paint on their bodies. The bold protest drew national attention and underscored the urgency of global debt relief as a key element in the fight against AIDS.

She was born Nanette Natalina Bottinelli on June 12, 1941, in New York City. Her father, Angelo, worked as a waiter at the St. Regis Hotel, while her mother, Betty McComb, was a part-time burlesque dancer. 

She married her first husband, Fred Kochendorfer, in 1963, and they had two children together, Kim Skrobe and Kelly, both of whom survive her. 

Kazaoka’s journey to Fire Island marked a transformative period in her life. Kochendorfer wanted to live there, and so they began renting in 1967. Kazaoka then made a bold decision that would shape her future: She left her husband for another man and began living on Fire Island in 1968-1969, with the children attending school in Ocean Beach, according to the family’s statement.

This period coincided with the early days of the gay rights movement, as Fire Island was emerging as a hub for LGBTQ culture. Her experiences during these years contributed to the strong sense of activism and solidarity that would later define her role in ACT-UP and the broader fight for LGBTQ rights.

Kazaoka’s second husband, Katsushiga “Kats” Kazaoka, a Japanese-American psychologist who had been interred during World War II, died of cancer in 1984, pushing her to enter the workforce as a receptionist while studying occupational therapy at Downstate Medical Center. By 1990, she had earned her degree and sought work with AIDS patients.

In 1988, a close friend introduced her to ACT-UP, sparking the start of her full-time dedication to AIDS activism, the family said. Kazaoka became known for her passionate, unrelenting activism, whether protesting at City Hall or challenging anti-LGBTQ policies at St. Luke’s Hospital.

Kazaoka’s activism spanned 35 years, making her a beloved and respected figure within ACT-UP and beyond, the family noted. She was featured in Sarah Schulman’s “Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT-Up New York, 1987-1993” as well as “Act-Up Oral History, No. 162,” a digital history. She was the cover photo of “Fag Hags, Divas and Moms: The Legacy of Straight Women in the AIDS Community,” and was included in The New York Times T Living Magazine story, “LEGENDS PIONEERS AND SURVIVORS.

Her dedication to science continued even after her passing: She donated her brain to the Mount Sinai NIH Brain and Tissue Repository for research to advance the understanding of the human brain health and disease to help end dementia, the family said.

Along with her daughters, Kazaoka is survived by her son-in-law John Skrobe, granddaughter Stella Skrobe and daughter-in-law Christine Arax, all of New York. She and her third husband, Paul Haskell, divorced in 2000. 

The Solidaire Network published this obituary on its website. The Washington Blade is posting it with permission.

Born and raised on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, Coya was a proud enrolled member of the Sicangu Lakota Oyate or Rosebud Sioux Tribe. From the age of 15, she dedicated her life to advocating for Indigenous and Two Spirit rights, becoming a fierce organizer and a visionary leader in movements for justice. As a founding member of the First Nations Two Spirit Collective, Coya worked tirelessly to uplift Two Spirit youth, support Indigenous reproductive justice, and connect these communities to philanthropic spaces to drive transformative change.  

Coya’s advocacy for Indigenous reproductive justice was rooted in a deep understanding of its inseparability from the fight for Indigenous sovereignty. She saw this work as part of a 500-year history of resistance to colonization, weaving together the rights to access abortion, raise children in safe and sustainable environments, steward healthy lands and waters, practice Indigenous cultures, speak ancestral languages, and govern sovereign communities. Recently she served as a board member for SisterSong and the American LGBTQ+ Museum. Coya was a fierce leader who brought dedication and brilliance, impacting gender and reproductive justice efforts around the world.   

In 2020, Coya’s visionary leadership brought the world’s first fund dedicated to Indigenous reproductive justice, Building the Fire Fund, into existence. Guided by an Indigenous Advisory Council of women and Two Spirit leaders from across Turtle Island, the fund represents a powerful testament to Coya’s dedication and collaborative spirit. Coya co-authored “Tired of Dancing to Their Song: An Assessment of the Indigenous Women’s Reproductive Justice Funding Landscape” with Zachary Packineau. This seminal report provides a critical roadmap for philanthropy to support and grow the emerging field of Indigenous reproductive justice.  

In 2023, Coya brought Building the Fire Fund to Solidaire Network, where we are honored to walk alongside the Advisory Council in advancing this vital work. Coya’s passion, wisdom, and dedication will continue to guide and inspire all of us who were privileged to know her and work beside her.  

To honor Coya’s legacy and her vision for the Indigenous reproductive justice movement, we invite you to contribute to the Building the Fire Fund. Your support ensures that her transformative work will continue, lighting the way for generations to come.  

Coya White Hat-Artichoker’s life was a powerful testament to resilience, love, and unwavering commitment to justice. While her presence will be deeply missed, her legacy will endure as a beacon of hope and strength for all who carry her vision forward.